Me and Mine
by AlreadyPainfullyGone
Summary: Castiel is a gay priest and devoted to repressing himself, until he meets seventeen year old Dean who needs help in denying his own sexuality. Inconvenient though it is, they fall in love and move from denial to platonic love to something more complex.
1. Chapter 1

_**WAIT! **__Hi, I hate author notes, so I'll keep it short. I loved this plot so much that I turned it into an original work of fiction. A longer, better written ebook that is available NOW from , if you want to at least read the blurb. Me and Mine with the two hands clasped on the front cover. _

_So you can enjoy a better, longer, more in-depth version of this story._

_But if you came for the fanfiction, more power to you, I wrote it for people to enjoy so which ever one you choose –_

_Enjoy _

"Go on."

Dean shuffles in his seat, his eyes flicking to the square of grille work. The confessional is small and warm, smelling of beeswax polish and the smudgy scent of generations of candles and incense. It doesn't cover the scent of the man behind the grille, or at least, Dean still imagines he can smell him. Mint toothpaste and lemon soap, the detergent on his robes like ozone and starch. He can hear Father Novak's breathing, level and calm as he waits for Dean's next sin.

"I've disobeyed my parents." He stalls. "I lied to them and stole ten dollars for a new CD...they hate my music." He tries to breathe but it comes out too loud, rasping through his lips. "I left off on my chores and football practice...I've been lazy...and..."

"Go on, my son." His voice is deep and calm, listening to the lesser sins that Dean has committed.

"It's worse Father...I..." He shuffles in his chair again and the warm air closes around him like a fist, sweat dampens his collar.

"I need not remind you that this is a private ritual." Father Novak soothes him with his proper tone and prescribed phrases. "No one but myself and God will know of your confession."

"I've had thoughts Father...about men."

The pause is torturous.

"I see." The priest breathes regretfully. "Is that the extent of it?"

"No, I..." Dean swallows hard. "I've..."

"You gratified yourself?" His voice is soft and Dean feels his breath catch, at the words, the way in which the priest says them, the way they make his stomach curl in anticipation and revulsion.

"Yes" his voice is small, shamed, because it is so much worse than that, so much worse, and he still has to tell that part of it. "Only a few times Father..."

"It is still a sin, even if the act is performed rarely." His voice is regretful and Dean detects sympathy in it.

"I know...but, Father...I think my thoughts are the greater sin."

"How so?"

"I think...I have thought...of you, Father." His stomach tightens and he feels his face burn with shame, his body locking and filling with heat. The priest is silent for a good long while.

"My son..."

"Don't pretend you don't know who I am." Dean's voice shakes. "We're a congregation of thirty people...you know who I am, Father."

"Dean..." Father Novak sighs.

"I need help." He's only known Father Novak for a year, and for the first fifteen years of his life their priest was an older man, Father Sandover, and the younger man must surely be able to help him in ways their previous priest would not have been able to.

"I realise that, but it is not worth breaching confessional over." The priest sighs. "See me after the remainder of the service. I'll see what I can do."

"Thank you Father."

"and Dean...this took a great deal of courage, taking the first steps towards redemption is often difficult." He hears the rustle of robes, the soft chink of the other mans rosary, the door of the confessional opens and Father Novak is gone. Dean sags against the chair, knowing that the hard part is only just beginning.

Father Castiel Novak knows a great deal about struggling with one's own demons. He's successfully fought his homosexuality for most of his life, entering the priesthood and taking his vows of celibacy, of chastity, with the knowledge that he was strengthening himself against temptation and moving closer to God. Now he is in the position to help another, and he thanks his heavenly Father for the opportunity to strengthen himself further and bring another soul on the verge of sin back into the fold.

Dean Winchester had let his anonymity in the confessional slide, but Castiel had known his identity and it would be foolish to attempt to pretend that he didn't. Dean was the son of John and Mary Winchester, brother to Samuel who served in the choir as Dean had done before he entered puberty. Dean was almost seventeen and coming into adulthood would be hard enough without the unnatural urges he had confessed to.

_I think of you, Father._

It was most distressing to consider that Dean found his priest, his bastion against sin and temptation, a figure of lust. It was an evil thing indeed and one that Dean should not have to bear alone.

After the remainder of confession and his few other duties to his congregation, Castiel met Dean in his office at the back of the church.

"Please have a seat." He directs Dean to a chair by the desk and takes the one opposite. Free from the restrictions of the confessional booth he can regard Dean openly and what he finds is mildly upsetting, something he had previously not thought on.

Dean is beautiful. To such an extent that Castiel wraps his hands in his rosary beneath the cover of the desk, feeling the beads press into his knuckles. The teenager is perfect, clear tanned skin and flawless green eyes beneath a sloppily cut fringe of brown hair. He still retains some childish softness, but the majority of his frame is swelling with muscle and broadening at the shoulders and chest. Castiel casts his eyes down Dean's body, the tight, worn cotton of his dress shirt giving way to good slacks that are straining thanks to a growth spurt that seems to have caught the boy unaware. His eyes caress the weight between the boys thighs and beneath his robes he feels his own groin twitch.

His fingers tighten on the rosary. He will not think these things, about a child no less.

"Thank you for seeing me Father."

Castiel lays the hand that isn't wrapped painfully tight with beads, on the desk. "You're welcome, but I feel I should stress, given what you have admitted to me, that though I'm here to help you Dean, perhaps it would be best...given the nature of your preoccupation, to see another priest, or counsellor?" He has to do this, his response to the boy is proof that this is an inappropriate meeting.

Dean shakes his head.

"You're the only one who can help, because of that." Dean clenches his hands on his thighs and the motion pulls the fabric tighter, Castiel fights the compulsion to look down at him. He wins, but barely. "I need you to be my priest, then maybe...maybe I won't feel like this."

"I understand." Castiel sighs inwardly and accepts the challenge that God has set in front of him. Dean is both a temptation and a suppliant, and Castiel will deal with him as such, calling him back to righteousness whilst protecting his own purity. He lowers his voice.

"This is not something I would...publicise...by any means." He says carefully. "but when I was younger, slightly more so than yourself...I found myself in much the same position." Dean's eyes meet his and he swallows nervously. "It is a struggle which never ends, I can assure you...but you can choose to be good, Dean...you can control yourself."

Dean nods with an intensity which truly makes Castiel feel for him. "That's what I want...to control it."

"And you can, you will." Castiel smiles. "Prayer is obviously your first recourse, but if you wish you may come to the church in the evenings and discuss any difficulties with me, and I can offer some explanation and techniques for controlling the...impulse, for gratification."

Dean flushes and his eyes fall to the desk top. Castiel quashes the thought that he blushes so prettily for one usually so brash. He replaces it with concern for the boy's welfare, plans for future meetings.

"I'd like that Father." Dean manages. "It's difficult to...I don't think I can do this alone."

"You don't have to." Castiel meets his eyes with all the warmth and kindness he possesses. "You have God, and you have me, and yourself." His eyes bore into those innocent green irises. "You're stronger than you believe yourself to be."

"I wish that was true."

"I wish you could see that it is." Castiel leans back in his chair, not having realised that he had moved towards the boy. "You should return to your parents, I'll see you tomorrow night, if that is agreeable to you?"

"Yes. Thank you Father."

"You're welcome...Dean."

Dean leaves his office and Castiel opens the adjoining door that leads into his home. He removes his robe, his shoes and his underclothes. Running the cold faucet into the old claw footed tub he stares at himself in the mirror, eyes tracing the beginnings of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. He's almost thirty. He's come this far. Once the tub is full he steps into it and lowers himself beneath the freezing water, suppressing a yelp at the sudden heart stopping change in temperature. The beginning of his arousal fails under the force of the assault on his body. He leans back against the frigid porcelain and closes his eyes, feeling the needles of cold travel over his skin.

_Dear God, let me be strong enough to hold myself in check, let this challenge not be beyond my abilities, be with me, and also with Dean in this endeavour. _

He picks up his rosary with one hand, holding it as he slides beneath the water. For the single twitch of his organ beneath his robes, for the moment in which he found the boy beautiful, he turns through thirty repetitions.

_Hail Mary full of grace, the lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women..._

Pounding the pavement back towards his home Dean offers up his own prayer with every step.

_Please God don't let my fuck this up...Please God don't let me fuck this up..._


	2. Chapter 2

The first night, a week after Castiel receives Dean's confession, he has Dean sit in his office and list his triggers. This is harder than expected. What Castiel remembers doing as a teenager is listing all the things that aroused him, or things that represented a temptation. Dean stares at the blank pad for a long time, then rubs his knuckles across his closed eyes.

"I can't do this."

"Yes, you can." Castiel soothes him, then rips a sheet from the pad and selects a pen for himself. "Start with the first thing you remember, the first time it happened." Dean looks at him for a long moment and Castiel wonders if Dean is recalling a fantasy about him, then the boy sets to his paper and Castiel begins the exercise himself. It never hurts to remind himself that he is weak, even now.

They write in silence for a long time, the electric light overhead glowing yellowish in the shadowed office. Castiel completes his list and gets up, going to his kitchen and returning with tea for both of them. Dean barely looks at the drink, sipping in between noting point after point on his pad.

"Done." He says, finally, setting his pen aside and looking anxiously at the priest. "Do I have to..." he motions with the paper.

"I don't have to read it if you wish to keep it to yourself." Dean frowns at the piece of paper, anxiety evident on his face. "Dean." He looks up. "It really is your decision, and it's ok if you wish to keep the list private."

He holds out the paper, eyes on Castiel's. "Read it."

Castiel takes the list and reads it in silence. Most of it is what he expected, Dean responds to suggestive music, to images designed to be received sexually, present on billboards and in magazines. He feels uncomfortable in the locker room when with his team mates; he is excited by sex scenes in movies and in literature, and seeks release accordingly. He fantasises and masturbates habitually, and admits on paper in cramped, embarrassed handwriting, that he pleasures himself anally.

Castiel reads the list without expression, knowing that much of it is common, expected almost, given the nature of Dean's fixation. Near the bottom of the page Dean details his fantasies, clearly paired down and stripped of anything resembling lewd detail. There are three of them, and all of them feature Castiel himself. He reads these with as much detachment as he can force on himself, because despite the clinical nature of their description, God help him he can see them.

_I fantasise that Father Novak kisses me, that I'm naked and he touches me._

_I fantasise that Father Castiel performs oral sex on me, in the sacristy._

_I dreamt that I sodomised a man, and when he said my name I realised it was Father Novak. (This was just a dream, but I was aroused, I don't know if that counts)_

"Yes it does." Castiel says. "Though such things are beyond your control in a way your own thoughts are not."

Dean blushes, knowing exactly what Castiel has read.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have written..."

"You should confess to anything that stands between you and being healthy." Castiel says softly. He pushes his own list towards the teenager. "When we are alone we see who we truly are, marrying that with confession is how we know who we should strive to be."

Dean reads the priests list with a growing sense of empathy.

"Is all of this true?" He asks finally. Castiel nods. The list is much the same as Dean's in terms of the effects of outside stimulus. He has also listed arousal from being touched by men in a platonic sense, such as when he has his hair washed and cut, and from being seen in a state of undress, whether at the leisure centre or working outside. His fantasies are few and far between as they are something he learnt to control in his adolescence. The only one he lists, the only one he still has trouble with, is the idea of being attacked, held down and forced into intercourse. He realises that this relates to his own desire for blamelessness in the act of fornication and tries to deal with it whenever the thought arises.

"How do you take it?" Dean asks. "It feels like it's there, all the time, and the more I try to ignore it the more I can't help but see..." he exhales. "I feel like a perv the whole time." He frowns at the desk top.

"You're not." Castiel looks at the boys bent head and feels a pang of compassion for his suffering.

"I just told you I fantasise about sucking your cock." Dean snaps his mouth shut and the anger drains from his face. "Shit, I'm sorry Father."

Castiel's dick jumps at both the profanity and the imagery. He digs his nails into his thigh unseen and squeezes until he feels the skin give. He struggles to keep his face and voice impassive.

"I understand how frustrating it can be. But I am not going to tell you that you're a monster." Dean's face takes on such a grateful, relieved expression that Castiel has to look away. The idea of this boy needing him, wanting his approval, does not sit well with him in his current state. "You have an obsession, an illness...and that it not your fault." He says softly.

"Thank you Father." Dean's youthfully strong frame is curled in on itself in the hard chair, exhaustion and emotion evident in his every movement.

"I am doing comparatively little." Castiel shrugs off the soft words of gratitude and hands Dean back his list. "You've identified these weaknesses in yourself, now you have to find ways to avoid temptation altogether, or confront it successfully."

"How do I do that?"

"Well, we can try something. Think about..." Castiel casts his eyes to the list. "Think about something that would usually arouse you." Dean looks at him sharply.

"I thought you said I should avoid..."

"Overcoming the desire to succumb to temptation is incredibly difficult." Castiel says, voice low and earnest. "If you can identify the point at which you lose the battle with your better nature, you can stop a situation from getting that far."

Dean still seems nonplussed, but closes his eyes anyway.

"OK." Castiel guides him through the exercise briskly. "Think of something that would usually cause you to gratify yourself." Dean opens his eyes to look at him doubtfully, but complies anyway. He closes his eyes and a crease forms in his brow. Castiel has done this exercise himself, the point of it is to create temptation and then deny the impulse, the theory being that a desire you create yourself is easier to squash than one that arises unexpectedly.

Dean's breath comes in a rush and Castiel snaps back to attention, realising that he's been looking at the wall behind Dean rather than at the boy himself. Dean worries his lower lip with his teeth, hands resting on the edge of the desk in front of him. "OK." His voice is dry, shaking a little. "What do I do now?"

"Nothing." Castiel murmurs. "That's the point."

Dean makes a sound between a whine and a muffled grunt of discomfort. Castiel flexes his fingers, digging his nails into a fresh patch of flesh, he can do this, he can cope with this.

"It's not that difficult to not touch yourself." He mutters, voice low and hypnotic. "It won't kill you."

Dean swallows noisily.

"Think of something else." Castiel continues, his tone soothing. "It gets easier."

"Can you..." Dean swallows again. "Your voice isn't helping."

Castiel's nails pierce the skin in their bruised crescents. At the back of his mind the Lord's Prayer starts up of its own accord.

"I'm sorry." Dean says after a few quiet seconds.

"What were you thinking about?" The question comes from nowhere and for a second Castiel wonders who asked it, before connecting it to the movement of his own throat, to the heat flaring over his face.

Dean's hands tighten on the desk, knuckles white with effort.

Castiel is appalled with himself. "You don't have to...that was remiss of me."

He watches Dean in silence, wondering for the first time if this task is even within the bounds of what he can achieve.

"You're in the sacristy." Dean says, and something hot and heavy lands in Castiel's abdomen, a kick of blood working through him. "And I've come to see you...I don't know why, but then you..." he inhales shakily and the bottom drops out of Castiel's stomach. "you get down on your knees in front of me...you open up my pants, and you suck me."

Castiel can't move, can't feel save for the throbbing pain in his thigh and the matching ache in his groin.

"I've had that one before." Dean murmur's, his eyes still closed. "It always...I can never not touch, Father, when I think of you, like that."

"Dean." Castiel's voice is strong and it surprises him because he feels anything but strength in his veins. "Stop."

The boys eyes open and the green of them is drowned in pupil, his lips bitten red and sweat showing at his temples. Shame and grief contort his young features.

"I'm sorry, Father." Castiel wills his own arousal away, flinging his will up as a wall through which Dean's soft words cannot penetrate. He refuses to look at the bulge in the boys jeans, the one he knows will be there. He does not need that image to torment himself with.

"Try to avoid the situations you find stimulating." He gets out, keeping his voice steady and authoritative. "You should come and see me again if you think it will help you to overcome your difficulties."

Alone that night he plunges himself into the cold water bath, stomach empty of food because he has denied himself supper.

He prays Dean will not return.


	3. Chapter 3

For two weeks Castiel tends to his duties and his congregation. The problems come when he has time on his hands, time to think. He limits these periods of time as much as he can, but still he finds himself thinking about what would be best left alone.

He thinks about Dean in his quiet moments of torturous reflection. How the boy is coping, whether his reaction to Dean's slip in decorum has thrown him off the path of righteousness. Invariably his thoughts, well intentioned as they are, turn to Dean's flushed face, his bitten lips and dilated eyes.

In an effort to control himself he limits his meals to water, sugarless black coffee and dry toast twice a day. Flavours become a foreign thing to him. In the mornings he twists the dial of his shower all the way to cold and leaves it there. Hot showers feel too good to be allowed to touch his skin. He needs harsh treatment, nothing seductive, nothing sensual.

He cleans his house and the church itself in a flurry, dark robe heavy with splashes of water and sweat, he wrenches his back, light headed with hunger and sleeps fitfully on the floor beside his untouched bed.

It still isn't enough.

And it does not stop the dreams.

They are not themselves lewd. He dreams that he is warm and comfortable, the young, strong body in his arms unresisting and welcoming, soft hair and skin touching his own. They unsettle him more than sexual fantasies would – wanting Dean to lie with him, to just be close enough to touch, does not seem in itself to be an unreasonable desire.

It frightens him because he cannot fight it with morality, he cannot be disgusted with it or see it as a temptation.

Castiel sleeps less, preferring to read into the night, scrub floors and silver that is already clean, prepare sermons and pray circular, endless prayers.

Dean comes to see him halfway through the third week. Castiel opens the door of his office to a tentative knock and comes face to face with the boy's anxious face.

"Dean?"

"May I come in?" His voice is overly stiff and formal, Castiel clings to it like a talisman, nothing sinful can come of such a tone.

"Certainly." He widens the door and returns to his seat. "How can I help you?"

"I came to say sorry." Dean sits awkwardly in the chair opposite him. "I'm really sorry about what happened...I wasn't going to come back but..." He leans forwards. "but it's working, Father...what you told me..."

"I'm glad, Dean." Castiel feels a smile pinch his mouth. He is happy that Dean is finding some relief from his compulsions, though he feels a wave of jealousy that should be beneath him. "and you have nothing to apologise for."

"Father I..."

"It's already forgiven."Castiel's smile is genuine now, he doesn't feel that he could deny such an earnest boy honest forgiveness.

Dean smiles, relief evident in the sudden looseness of his shoulders. "Thank you Father." Dean's hands fidget on his thighs. "If it's alright with you...I'd like to keep going, with this...counselling thing."

Castiel feels his strength wane, he is so tired, so very tired.

"Dean...I don't think that would be appropriate."

The boy looks stricken.

"I knew it...you don't want to see me." Dean, for all his outward appearance of strength looks suddenly so small that Castiel has to fight the urge to circle the desk and comfort him as he would a child. A single touch, no matter how innocently intended, could break them both. He knows this, and so he does not move.

"Dean, if our last meeting is any indication...it may not be best for you to continue under my guidance."

"I can control myself Father." Dean meets his gaze levelly. "I know I was out of line, but I've been practicing restraint, and..." He frowns. "You look tired."

"What?" Castiel feels a jolt up his spine.

"Like you need more sleep..." Dean looks even more worried. "You're not...this isn't because of me is it? Because of what I did?"

"Don't trouble yourself with it my child." Castiel closes his priestly indifference around himself like a fire blanket.

"Father..." Dean's face is open, desperate, and Castiel responds to that desperation the way any God fearing man would, trying to offer solace, comfort. "Please...you're the only thing, the only one, who's helped me with this."

"There are other priests..."

"I need it to be you."

"Dean..."

"No, I...I know it sounds beyond stupid, that it has to be you even when you're part of my problem. But I can't help but feel like this." Castiel looks at the boy and sees so much conflict, so much anxiety in one so young.

"Very well." Castiel sends up a quick prayer for guidance. "You said you have practiced restraint in these past weeks?"

"Yes" Dean nods eagerly. "I followed the list and I stopped watching things that set me off, tried not to think about it and...well, I'm showering at home now, after practice." A flush deepens the tan of his face.

"You're doing very well." Castiel can see how much Dean needs praise for this, which has surely been a struggle for him, at his age sex is of great importance, a constant pressure in the body. He remembers that much from his own adolescence. "You're coping? With the cessation of the physical element."

Dean's blush deepens. "I'm trying Father."

"Good. But you must try harder." Castiel flicks to a page of notes pressed between two pages of his journal. "How long have you gone without?"

"Since..." Dean is practically stuttering with awkwardness. "Since the last time I saw you."

Castiel swallows.

"Have you tried alternative action, to combat arousal?"

"What would I have to do?"

"I find discomfort to be effective." Castiel links his fingers and sets his hands on the table. "A sharp pain or unpleasant sensation, like a cold shower."

"Is that why..." Dean nods towards Castiel's lap. "That thing with your leg."

Castiel blinks once, wrong footed.

"I saw you doing it last time." Dean says softly, and Castiel feels caught out, knowing now that Dean knows that he was aroused. "Does it work?"

"Very well." Castiel lets his eyes fall to the desk. "As does restricting other activities that influence the libido, sensual food, relaxation, prolonged nakedness...reducing them can help." Dean nods, his eyes contemplative. "There are also other things for you to consider, in my case I chose to enter the priesthood...you must redirect your attentions towards women your own age."

"You mean date?" Dean looks uncertain of this idea.

"Eventually yes." Castiel taps the surface of the desk absently. "Why don't you continue, with the abstinence and we can meet to discuss any problems or questions you may have?"

Dean nods. "Thank you, Father."

"I'll see you on Sunday." Castiel shows Dean from the church and watches him jog towards the street corner.

Dean reaches his house in record time, jumping up the porch steps and shrugging off his mother's offer of dinner with a grin and a muttered 'Not hungry Mom' he crashes through the door of his room and closes it behind him, sitting down on the end of the bed.

Castiel said he could keep seeing him. His heart kicks happily at the thought.

Dean closes his eyes and counts backwards from two hundred, hands clenched on his thighs. It barely helps at all. Seeing Father Novak, thinking about him, affects him in ways he can't begin to control.

At least not yet.

His cock twitches and he bites his lip, hard.

He can control himself, and he can get better. With just a little more practice.


	4. Chapter 4

To say that Dean is trying his hardest would be to understate the sheer, teeth gritting effort that goes into his every waking moment.

He controls his thoughts at all times, is alert for problematic influences like pictures of men or naked men on the television in the den. Dean buys pyjamas to wear in bed, so that he is not tempted whilst sleeping naked. He throws out the lubricant he keeps in his bedside drawer and tells his rosary when he wakes up, half hard and with the afterimage of blue eyes seared into his brain.

He's trying so hard it hurts.

He's being so good and it's cruel that, just like drugs hit the system best when you're clean – Father Novak affects him now more than ever. It's like he's cut himself off from all other meaningless stimulation, taken away all his outlets, and then there's the priest, and Dean can't look at him without wanting. Wanting so badly it aches.

He's not an idiot, he's only almost seventeen and, ok, so he's hot, he gets noticed, but there's nothing there to interest someone like him, someone older and intelligent and so together he makes Dean's scattered thoughts and prayers look like a car turning frantic circles in the gravel.

And yet he still needs him, he needs Father Novak's help, even if the final stage of that help will be to cut himself off from Dean entirely. He knows it's coming and yet the threat of separation, that this time when he can at least look at the other man will come to an end, does nothing but make him want more.

Father Novak is too lithe, too pale and bright and impossibly unblemished to be anything less than perfect. Dean sees it in every sermon he delivers and in all their meetings. Blue eyes resting on his own, long pale fingers wound in rosary beads. Dean sits through hours of church just watching his soft mouth form the words of the teachings, of each ingrained ritual. The way his eyelashes lie flush against his skin when he closes his eyes to pray, his voice like rolling thunder and intimate murmur all at once.

It's because of this effect that he is back in confession.

"Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been four weeks since my last confession."

Castiel hear Dean's voice and wonders why it is that God is rubbing salt into this most painful of wounds.

"May God bless you and keep you." He reels off. "Tell me what you have done, child."

It doesn't help that he can imagine Dean, that stubborn set to his jaw and cheekbones, belied by the softness of his mouth, the smoothness of his face. Dean is young yet and is for all his mannerisms but a boy in a body that is slowly coming into manhood.

"I've failed myself Father...I..." Dean licks his lips and Castiel can hear the sound. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry and I've worked so hard Father."

For a second, no more than a second but God help him if that second isn't Hell itself, Castiel is sure Dean is going to confess to being with a man. The thought of Dean, carnally open with a stranger is perhaps the most horrific thing Castiel can conceive.

"What sin is it that you have committed?" He asks softly.

"I was..." Dean shifts restlessly, his voice harsh and low with shame and desperation. "I lost it Father...I couldn't...it's just your _voice_."

Castiel is growing to hate himself for the ways in which Dean's desire increases his own. He knew as soon as Dean confessed to him initially that he should not engage the boy and attempt to council him, he has only been proved right every time Dean confessed to further fantasies, further obsessions. It is his own desire that allowed Dean to convince him to return to this folly. Now he is here, in an enclosed space, listening to this perfect boy tell him that his voice is like a tool to break through his reserve.

"The sermon...?" A creeping combination of disgust and arousal coiling in him. "You mean to say...you ..." he flushes as he says it, even though no one is there to see. No one but God anyway. "You touched yourself?" he murmurs, brokenly.

"Father..." There is no denial there. Dean had sat in one of the pews and pleasured himself through the service. He knows he looked at Dean, more than once and thinks now that perhaps he had seen a kind of...restlessness to him, the furtive motion of one hand, out of sight. It is both appalling and appealing.

"This is a church Dean...this is..." Castiel feels the wrongness of it crawl over him, and it still isn't enough to curb the response of his body. "everyone is here, everyone, to worship – do you understand the...the implications of this act? It's a damnable offence."

"So give me, something, penance – tell me it's wrong." There's hopelessness in his voice. "Because right now I really need to believe in Hell, Father...I need to know what this'll cost me because I...I can't stop." He sounds both broken and aroused and Castiel cannot, will not, listen to this man, this _boy _fall apart for him so wantonly.

The lesser sin here is in saving himself. Dean must cease to be his concern, now that his own chastity, his own fealty to God, is in danger.

"Dean...I cannot absolve you of this, knowing that you are capable of it...you must find someone else to help you back to what is right...I fear I have failed you in that and all else."

"Father, please don't." Dean shifts and Castiel can hear his voice clearer, closer as his face comes near the grille, perfect features hazy behind the fine mesh.

"You must still attend on Sunday, your parents would think it remiss if you didn't...but as for our sessions, any contact with me would be inadvisable. I will recommend you to another priest...Father Milton perhaps."

"I won't go." Dean's strength returns with a sudden rush. "You can't just send me to someone else, some stranger, and expect me to go willingly."

"This is your soul, my son." Castiel stresses. "You must do what is best for yourself, and becoming closer to me is most definitely not in your best interests." He sighs. "We are both compromised, and you..." Castiel bites his lip. "You tempt me in ways I had not thought possible."

"Father..." and the sheer, unmasked desire in the boys voice is enough to make him shiver.

"No." He says, roughly, sharply. "It ends now, and for both our sakes keep both your thoughts and your hands to yourself."

Dean recoils at the harsh words and Castiel senses his upset, but he holds strong in the face of it.

Dean bolts from the confessional after a few fraught seconds, and Castiel hears his feet hammering the stone floor as he runs to the exit. Thankfully the church is entirely empty, Dean's is the last confession he will hear.

Castiel makes his way to the alter, gets down on his knees and begins his prayers, working his way around his rosary.

He stays on the floor for just under five hours, and when he is done, when he can pray no more, he feels there is little point in moving.


	5. Chapter 5

_No idea where this is going. Italics here differentiate the views of Castiel and _Dean _just to keep things clear._

Dean turns his music up, feeling the bass thunder in his headphones and his heart thump along, skipping with the beat. His room is an ecstatic mess, record sleeves and paperbacks tossed all over the floor, clothes wound and tangled over the chair and his desk. He used to clean to distract himself from his lust, but now his misery does the job perfectly.

Father Novak is disgusted with him. He cannot be saved.

Two thoughts that feed into each other and off each other until Dean needs to hit something, throw something, just for the jolt of violence that quietens his mind. He fingers the hem of his tattered Led Zep shirt, lying on his bed, an island in the destruction, he listens to his music and flinches every time he remembers the priest's voice, or how his eyes looked when he was pleased and hopeful.

His parents have no idea, no idea at all, why their son, such a good boy until now, has grown pinched and withdrawn, sullen even. Sammy's still playing the choir boy routine but he's worried about Dean too. He can't stand it, all this love and concern, because he's disgusting – he's wrong, backward, ruined, possessed, obsessed, fucked up, repulsive, repugnant...and even Father Novak can see no good in him, has cut himself off from Dean's taint and left him to his irrepressible sin.

He feels scooped out, empty and raw with his own searing self assessment. He hates his own brain with everything he has. He hates his body for not reacting the way it's supposed to, for ignoring the girls around him and stirring for his priest. Only for Father Novak.

Sam throws the door of his room open and shouts something that Dean can't hear over the drowned roar of the music. He swipes the headphones from his head.

"What?" His ears are ringing and a tension headache is building behind his eyes.

"Mom wants to know if you're coming down for dinner."

"No." He scrambles for the headphones, intent on getting back to his music.

"What's up with you?" Sam apparently hasn't got the message.

"Nothing." He grunts, looking down his body at his younger brother.

"Not buying it."

"Not my problem Sammy."

Sam hops down the stairs for dinner and Dean turns unto his front and buries his face in his pillow. There's a fairly large part of him that never wants to move again, that kind of wants to lie here until he starves. He knows he's being stupid, that teenage broken heart madness is beneath him. But he's powerless against the numbing wave of hot shame and loss.

He wants. He can't have. And now he can't even think of Father Novak without hearing his disgusted voice, his fearful words.

He turns the music up and hunches in on himself.

_Castiel dumps the last empty ice tray onto the pile on the counter. There is little else in his kitchen these days, a few scattered groceries from the few times he'd bought food in the last few weeks, and then not much. _

_He goes upstairs to the bathroom._

_The ice bobs on the surface of the water, radiating its brittle chill. He lowers one foot into the tub, naked and fragile, it clenches, shaking as it touches the bottom. Fully immersed Castiel cannot stop the shivers that rip through him, his teeth are gritted, jaw tight and spasming with chills. The ice pops and cracks around him, cold water streams from the faucet into the already mostly filled tub. _

_Dean. Winchester._

_His head slips beneath the water level._

_Don't fuck. Don't even think about fucking. Don't touch. Don't think about touching. _

_The profanity burns his mind in ways he can't vocalise. These are the rules of his life. Underneath the cold tenets and regimes he follows in his duties – these are his own, personal laws._

_He opens his mouth and breaths out. _

_Everything is much simpler when he can't feel his skin._

_He raises his nose above water level and takes another quick breath before returning to the bottom of the tub._

Dean already thinks this is a bad idea, scuffing through the darkened streets, well after curfew and without his parent's say so, boots striking off the asphalt and scruffy jeans and shirt not keeping out the cold. He's going to church, though in fairness, not for any reason they would be likely to approve of.

He needs to speak to Father Novak again. He needs...something. Understanding, sympathy, absolution...maybe just to see him. He isn't sure, and he doesn't think he ever will be.

Dean reaches the church and goes in, the door to the priest's office is closed, he knocks and there is no reply, but light shows under the door.

"Father Novak?" He pushes the door tentatively and it opens. The light is on, but there is no one there. He looks uneasily at the door to the priest's home. He frowns. There's a sound, a soft almost imagined sound, coming from behind the door. He opens it carefully, preparing to meet the displeased eyes of Father Novak himself, already bracing himself for the shock the on the man's face.

Inside the house, beside the door to the church office, is the staircase to the upper floor.

There's water running down it.

Thin rivulets of water dripping almost, but not quite soundlessly, from step to step, soaking the carpet runner and pooling on the wood.

Dean stands stock still for a moment, then starts to climb the stairs, at first in a daze of curiosity and surprise, then with growing urgency.

"Father Novak? Father!"

There's more water on the landing, a thin sheet of it welling from beneath the door at the end of the hall in a swirl that sends tiny waves across the wood. Dean splashes hectically through the water and twists the handle of the door, it opens and for a confused second he wonders why even a man who lives alone wouldn't lock his bathroom door.

Because it is a bathroom, with an old fashioned claw footed tub, overflowing with water from the cold faucet. The black and white tile floor is awash with it, a drowned washrag hovering limply in the tide.

Father Novak is sprawled in the tub, held lightly by the water, dark hair moving with its waves. His eyes are closed and his skin is a grey so fine its almost blue.

Dean doesn't even think, he's already sloshing over the slick tiles, grabbing the slighter man under the arms and hauling him out of the tub with enough force to send both Dean and the waterlogged weight of the priest backwards and onto the bathroom floor.

He fumbles against the other mans freezing skin, trying to find a pulse. And there is one, just, weak and vague and irregular. He lifts him clumsily, until the unconscious body is half standing, half resting in his arms, dragging him from the bathroom and bumping doors open until he can find a bed.

Leaving him for a second he goes back and twists the faucet off, yanking the plug from the bathtub and grabbing all the towels he can find. He drops them onto the floor to soak up the water, retaining one with which to dry the man in the bedroom.

Father Novak makes no movements as Dean chafes the towel over his frigid skin, drying his hair, blue-black and untidy, chasing the water from his limbs and chest with the swatch of dark blue fabric. He barely takes in the details of the man beneath him, the dark hair on his chest and the fragile bones of his body showing through the pale skin. He doesn't react to the sight of his naked groin, just gets him dry and then lifts him again, bundling him towards the bad and covering him with the blankets.

Two things stay with him from the brief period in which he had the priest naked before him. Firstly that he looked as if he hadn't eaten properly for weeks, and secondly that the tops of his thighs were lividly bruised and marked with fingernail crescents, over and over until the skin had wept and grown sore.

Dean runs his hand over the softly drying mess of dark hair that tops the pale, unconscious face of the priest.

He doesn't know any prayers for this.


	6. Chapter 6

Dean cleans up most of the water with a mop from a cupboard in the kitchen. Aside from the flooding, the place is immaculate, unnaturally clean and tidy. He imagines the priest cleaning this place, as he must have done recently, feverishly, to achieve this kind of cleanliness. He thinks of his own room, a flurry of minor destruction in the wake of his upset. This dustless house has the same feel to it.

In the bedroom he finds that Father Novak hasn't stirred, not that he was expecting him to. Dean watches the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath the blankets, catching the occasional convulsive shiver as the man's body tries to warm itself on too little fuel. He wishes he could take off his own sodden jeans and shirt, crawl under the sheets and press his slightly warmer body, stronger, younger, against the frail body of the priest. He holds back only because he knows the priest would not look favourably on him for the action.

Instead he climbs on top of the covers, fully clothed, lying as close as he can without actually touching him.

The other man is beautiful. Dean would never admit to thinking it, except perhaps maybe in the aftermath of intimacy, but there is no other word to describe it. The frightening grey of his skin has returned to its normal paleness, his lashes are smudges of darkness beneath bruise coloured eyelids. His lips relaxed from their usual hard pressed line into a soft blur of pink.

Under his gaze the other man shifts slightly, frowning as he begins to wake.

Dean instantly feels like he's been caught doing something perverted. He's only looking, looking at the priest's _face_, it's not like he's pulling back the sheets to get another good look at his body.

The priest's eyes open suddenly, blue sparking up in their formerly senseless depths.

"Dean?" He takes in his own nakedness, shifting beneath the sheets, then Dean, and the fact that they're in his bedroom. "What happened?" He tries to sit up, but fails and slides weakly back against the pillows.

"Nothing." Dean presses a hand down on the other man's blanket covered torso, easing him back onto the mattress. "Nothing, you just had an accident." He keeps his voice soft, almost a whisper. The priest frowns, then his eyes flicker in understanding and he looks towards the door.

"I fell asleep."

"You passed out."

The priest's eyes close again, a line of tension appearing between them.

"When was the last time you ate something?"

He makes a sound between a grumble and a whine. Dean abruptly feels bad for pressing him, clearly he's struggling enough.

"I'll make you something, alright?" He soothes. "You promise you'll eat it?"

Castiel, woken bleary and warm from a sleep so deep he was free of his dreams, confronted with Dean in his damp clothes, eyes wide with concern for him, crumples under the weight of his kindness. His will has been over stretched, he's too tired to fight his desire to give in to Dean's care.

"Yes." He nods once. "I'd like that." The boy looks at him as if he's weighing the risks of leaving him alone again, then climbs off of the bed and walks out of the room. Dimly Castiel hears him make his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. He lets his head fall back against the pillows.

He remembers nothing from the time he was lying in the bath tub, freezing water covering him completely. He supposes it was inevitable that his exhaustion would catch up with him, but to be laid low in this way by measures he took only to safeguard himself...it hurts him more than he'd care to admit. He wonders what it is that is required of him, if not to help Dean because of his own preoccupation with the boy, if not to resist him because his body is too weak to endure without softness, without warmth...then what? What must he do to save himself, or to save them both?

He tries to think, to pray, but there's nothing. Silence where the words should be. He can't even begin to address God like this, when he needs him most.

Dean returns with over milked coffee and a solitary pop tart. He sets both on the night stand and nods at them. Castiel takes the hint and sets to the food, realising that he's moaned around his first bite only when Dean squirms at the sound.

He swallows.

"My apologies." He feels a faint flush of shame. To have fallen so low. He looks up only to find that Dean's eyes aren't on his, they're fixed on his mouth.

Dean watches the pad of the priest's tongue wipe away the smudge of frosting on his lower lip. The resulting stab of arousal is so sharp it hurts. Twisting cruelly in his stomach. He draws his knees up to his chest, sitting on the furthest corner of the bed, but he can't stop watching.

"Do your parents know you're here?" Castiel drinks the coffee methodically, feeling it burn his throat and settle in his chest.

Dean shakes his head.

"Why, are you here?" He sets the mug aside, tugging the blankets as high as they will go. "Not that I'm not grateful for your intervention...but...it probably wasn't your intended purpose."

"I wanted to see you...just see you."

"I think you've seen enough of me." He shifts under the blankets. "In the last few weeks and especially tonight." He shivers convulsively and Dean moves without thinking, drawing the blankets closer and pressing them to the other man, wrapping an arm over him. The priest's body goes tight and resisting.

"You're cold." Dean mutters. "and I didn't...I didn't touch you, like that...while you were out." It's beyond awkward but he has to make it known. He doesn't want to be thought of like that.

"I know." Castiel makes a concerted effort to relax himself. "This is..." his tongue chases across his dry lips, eyes closing as he struggles with himself. "This is too much, I'm sorry." He tries to push away from Dean but shudders in the cold and can't move far enough to stop the boy gently bringing him back.

"How is this bad?" he whispers against the shell of the priest's ear, tickly and soft. "You need me. I'm here. You're naked, but I'm not." The other man relaxes into him, no long tensed against the barrier of his arms. "It's not bad, for me to love you...is it?" It's an honest question, not rhetoric.

Castiel can only shake his head dumbly. And for once it feels so good to say 'No'.

"Ok...then can I stay here, with you?"

Another nod. Dean pulls him closer and buries his face in the warm hair at the back of his neck.

"What's your name?"

Castiel feels the whisper as much as he hears it.

"Castiel."

Dean smiles into the sensitive place behind his ear.

"Hello Castiel."


	7. Chapter 7

He can't pinpoint the moment he fell asleep, but nevertheless when Dean wakes him it's slightly lighter outside and he's aware that they've moved slightly, Dean no longer sitting, but curled around against his back, the blankets warm between them.

"Hey" Dean says softly. "I have to get back, my parents are gonna wonder where I am otherwise." Castiel stirs. "You don't have to get up." Dean presses him back to the bed. "Rest, I don't have anything to do today, I'll bring some groceries by later." He hesitates, then leans forward and presses a short kiss to the other man's forehead. "See you later Castiel."

"Thank you, Dean." Castiel feels a lot, overwhelmed with sleepy, slightly ill, fatigue and too much emotion. "Just...thank you."

"We can talk later." Dean pads to the door. "Get some sleep."

Castiel does, knocked out again before he hears the front door close.

Dean manages to get home and into bed just in time to be woken by Sam shoving the door open and telling him it's time for breakfast. Downstairs he prods sleepily at his plate of pancakes, unable to stop thinking about the priest's, Castiel's, abused body. He remembers the feel of his ribs through his chest as he hauled him out of the bath tub.

"Mom, do you mind if I skip out on yard work today?"

"There had better be a good reason." His Dad glares at him over the auto manual he's propped against his coffee mug.

"I heard yesterday that Father Novak was sick...thought I'd take some groceries over there and see if he has anything needs doing." He feels his parents exchange a look, this is the most communicative he's been for over a week.

"Sure honey." His mother sets a glass of juice down in front of Sam. "Tell him we're thinking of him." Dean looks down into his breakfast again.

"Will do."

He takes twenty dollars from the stash he's hiding at the bottom of his dresser and goes to the corner market on his way to the church. He has no idea what Castiel likes, so he sticks to the basics – coffee, milk, eggs, bacon and any kind of cookie that comes to hand.

By the time he gets over to the priest's home Castiel is awake again, dressed in faded jeans that he mostly keeps for yard work, and a plain white T-shirt that makes him look paler than ever. He opens the door to Dean and instantly looks wary. He's recovered himself enough to think on the inappropriateness of sleeping, naked, in the arms of an underage boy.

"Dean." His expression flutters between pleased and cautious. He takes in the bag of food in the boys arms. "You really didn't have to..."

"I wanted to." Dean shifts the weight more comfortably. He looks down at the ground between the priest's bare feet. "It's something I can do, for you."

Castiel recalls well the feeling of Dean's warm body, smooth and yielding beneath its faded denim, separated from his own skin by a few layers of cloth only. There is a lot Dean does to him, for him, and so much that he wants besides.

"Thank you." He moves back a little, allowing the boy into his home once more and knowing as he does so that he's crossing a line, yet another line between what they should be and what they are becoming.

Dean follows him into the kitchen, putting the boxes and packages away while Castiel watches.

"Did you have breakfast yet?" Dean asks, pausing with a carton of milk in his hand. Castiel gestures towards the cup of black coffee and the remainder of a slice of dry toast on the kitchen island. Dean frowns.

"You've got to have more than that." He retrieves packages from the refrigerator and takes a pan down from the rack. "Sit, I'll make you eggs." Dean becomes aware of how forward he's being, he's never ordered the priest before, never overruled his word. He chances a look at the older man, prepared to apologise or receive a lecture for his impudence. Instead Castiel is watching him with an odd look on his face.

"I would appreciate that, thank you." He says, slowly and as if the words are foreign to him.

It's been so long since someone cared for him as their own, as anything other than a facet of the community, as a man and not a priest.

Dean turns back to the business of making breakfast, aware of the other man's eyes on him the entire time. The back of his neck prickles with the feeling of being watched, and he finds himself moving just to give Castiel something to look at. Eventually he steps back from the stove, places a plate of food in front of the other man and sitting across from him as Castiel begins to eat, small bites passing neatly between his lips as he slowly consumes the food.

"So..." Dean starts, looking down at his hands on the kitchen counter. "Are we going to talk about this?"

"There's really nothing to speak about." Castiel sets his fork aside awkwardly. "there was no sin in it, but it cannot continue. You know that."

"You said there's nothing wrong with me loving you."

"I said..." Castiel swallows. "Academically no, but it's a technicality, we cannot become intimate...we cannot _be _intimate, and to admit to any kind of want between us is to open the door to folly."

There's a moment of heavy silence.

"You have no idea what it did to me...not seeing you." Dean murmurs. Castiel avoids his eye. "or maybe you do and that's why..." he feels himself getting upset, memories of the previous night striking him in all their slow-motion horror. "finding you like that was the worst thing that's ever happened to me...Hell has nothing on that..."

"You know _nothing_, of Hell." Castiel insists, bitterly. He hates that he allowed Dean to see him like that, that he failed to keep himself in control of his own body. "Hell is something so terrible no one can conceive of it, and that is where we are going if we don't remain strong." He breathes unsteadily. "You will go to Hell, Dean, if you allow me to touch you...and I will go to Hell for finding any kind of pleasure in you..." His voice is strained, the boy watching with a rapt kind of horror, taking it all in, the harshest sermon he has yet to deliver, and yet still that surge of love, of want. The desire to comfort, to hold, is bright in the boy's eyes. "You have no idea how much..." Castiel falters. "But it is not worth my soul, not worth damning someone as young as yourself, as innocent..."

"I'm not." Dean says automatically.

"Dean..."

"I'm not innocent, am I Father?" he insists, challenge evident in him. "The things I feel for you...the things I want to do...none of that makes me innocent...do you remember why I came to you? And why you sent me away, for..." his face almost crumples with the contrition that weighs his chest. "for touching myself...Castiel..." his name on the boy's lips is the worst kind of temptation, intense and undiluted. "for thinking of you and putting my hand on my cock." He lets the word strike for him. "in church Father, in the middle of a sermon...I'm already damned."

"No, you're not." Castiel shakes his head. "That's nothing compared to what you have left to lose, you won't know innocence until you lose it...Dean please listen to me."

"If you tell me, that you didn't miss me." Dean challenges, jaw set. "Castiel you...tortured yourself, you almost died, you can't tell me that you weren't thinking about me the whole time."

The priest closes his eyes.

"Tell me you don't want me." Dean's quiet voice hammers into his mind, a command to the suppressed demons of his psyche. "Tell me you don't love me...and I'll go." He finishes softly.

"Please, don't do this to me." He pleads, his throat thickening and a kind of unbearable tension straining in his body.

"Tell. Me." Dean is half braced for rejection, half hopeful.

"Dean..."

"Castiel." The strength of his voice makes him flinch.

The priest drops his head into his hands and says, so quietly that Dean almost misses the words.

"I love you...and I cannot bear to condemn you...not to this..." he looks up. "Dean...I'm...monstrous...I..." Words fail him and tears burn in his eyes.

Dean's on him in an instant, arms closing around him, bundling the slimmer man against his chest and burying his face against the top of his head. Castiel's whole body shakes with his first sob, and he can't, he just can't, not anymore. He can't pretend that he isn't just a man, that he isn't scared and lonely and just so, unbearably human.

He's disgusting and he's weak.

Dean rocks him gently, shushing softly with every harsh sob that comes from the other man.

"I love you." Dean murmur's against the priest's hair. "It's ok...it's alright...I love you, Castiel."

And he can't stop crying.


	8. Chapter 8

_Wow, this was hard to write. Also its 666 words long (without the authors note). _

Dean holds the broken priest, feeling the shoulder of his T-shirt slowly grow damp and listening to the tiny sounds of his sobs, muffled by the cloth. He can feel the sharpness of his shoulder blades beneath his hands, the knobs of the older man's spine. He swallows thickly, the texture of the priest's shirt soft and worn under his hands as he soothes his back. He tells him over and over again that it's ok, that he loves him, that there is nothing disgusting in him, that he is perfect.

Castiel trembles against him.

Dean hooks his fingers under the other man's jaw, drawing his head up and pressing his dry lips against his, flavoured with salt and bitten rough. It's a kiss, though innocent of tongue, as Dean keeps his mouth closed. The priest makes a small sound in the back of his throat, Dean strokes his hair gently, kissing him again, shaky and quick.

"Castiel?"

The priest shakes his head, eyes screwed shut, lines of wetness showing on his pale skin.

"Please look at me." Dean touches the side of his face and the other man opens his eyes, fierce bright blue showing between the reddened lids. He kisses him again, slowly, feeling the other man's mouth move a little against his own, a gruff sound of pleasure and misery caught in his throat. Dean moves away, stroking a thumb across Castiel's lips.

"I don't want to have this conversation again." He manages, all seventeen years of his authority going into every word. "I'm not leaving you, and I'm not going to damn you." His breath is warm on Castiel's face, his chest tight. "I love you."

"I love you...too." Castiel moves away from him. "And I want..."

"You know I'm legal, in a few months..." Dean says haltingly.

Castiel looks stricken.

"That isn't...that's not what I meant." Dean hunches a little at that, confused more than ever by the older man. "Dean...I'm not waiting for you to come of age, purely so I can..." he struggles. "Take you."

"I didn't think that, I don't think that." Dean takes the priest's hand and weaves their fingers together. "I just meant that, I'm old enough to choose, and I choose this, us."

"There can't be an us."

"There can." Dean holds on to him defiantly. "If you love me, I'll stay, we can be together, just like this. I don't need anything else."

"Dean...you're going to want to have sex." Castiel looks like he doesn't want to believe this, but he does all the same. "and you should. You should get married and have children with, a woman." He stresses.

"And if I don't want that?"

"There's a reason I took my vows, Dean." Castiel looks suddenly thinner and older than he should. "I couldn't commit to marriage, so I bonded myself with the church."

"So that's it? You don't get an...outlet? just because you didn't want to lie to some woman about who you are?" Dean strokes his hand. "You get to love God and live alone your whole life?"

"It's safer." Castiel's gaze strikes Dean's eyes. "You kissed me." He says, as if this is all the proof he needs that they are most definitely not safe together.

"If I come to see you again, are you going to turn me away?" Castiel looks down at their hands. "Because I meant it Castiel, I'm not going to keep telling you why you deserve something, anything, for yourself. I'm just going to be here, as long as you keep letting me in."

He gets up from his seat and walks towards the door, knowing that this might be the last of it, the last time he lays eyes on Castiel, the man, and not Father Novak.

"Dean..." Castiel touches his retreating back lightly and Dean turns around. "I will let you in." Dean takes his still slightly outstretched hand and presses a blunt kiss to its knuckles.

"Then I'll keep coming."


	9. Chapter 9

If he was to swear a vow to God it would be this –

_Dear Father, if you allow me this one transgression against your word, that of my love for another man, I swear I shall not consummate or compound my error further. I will endeavour to protect both myself and Dean from temptation, and take full responsibility on myself for the boy's purity._

_Father, if you let me love this boy I..._

That is where it would fall down. He has nothing to offer God accept the love that he has already freely given him. Nothing else seems worth what he is asking, what he wants. No act of charity of penance can equal the freedom to love and be loved.

He does not make such a vow because part of him feels that it is not something he has the right to ask. He cannot bargain with God.

Instead he prays –_ Father if I should fail in myself, please lay the blame with me and not with him. He is innocent, he was always innocent. _

It's the most he can do to reassure himself, that he has protected Dean as far as he is able, pre-empting his own weakness.

True to his word Dean visits as much as he can, and Castiel always opens the door and lets him into his home. For a while it is awkward, Dean brings him food and they sit on opposite sides of the kitchen table eating. The silence worries him for the first hour of their first meeting, until Dean breaks it with,

"I have no idea what to say to you." He rubs a hand over his face. "Pretty sure everything that's gone through my mind is dumb."

Castiel wonders how Dean sees him, older, more intelligent and experienced certainly. But Dean is the more interesting of them both, and he tells him so.

"Dean, I've been in the seminary and then in service for a long time." He smiles slightly. "anything you have to say would interest me greatly."

Dean looks at him for a long moment.

"When did you start training for this then?" he asks, hands fiddling with a cookie, crumbling it between his fingers nervously.

"My late teens...I'd always been involved with the church though, choir...alter service...my parents were devoted, I had very little time for anything else."

"So...you never did kid stuff? Movies, comics...music?" He looks aghast but hopeful.

"No." Castiel shakes his head and Dean beams, a smile opening up his face in a way that makes Castiel strangely grateful for his deprived childhood. Dean gets up from the table and bolts for the door.

"Wait there."

Castiel does as instructed.

What Dean returns with is the tape from his walkman. Castiel's one and only high-fi system, an ancient thing that had been donated for a charity sale some years ago and never purchased under the rule of his predecessor, is in the corner of his bedroom. Dean leads him upstairs and slots the tape into the machine dubiously, motioning for Castiel to sit on the bed.

He plays both sides of the cassette, talking during the lull between each song, telling him about the band, the title, the musicians themselves. He knows each song by heart and the order in which they play. Castiel listens to him talk, taking it all in and observing the passion with which Dean speaks of his music, which was once his Father's music, the tape bearing as it does recordings from John Winchester's discarded albums.

Halfway through the second side, 'Bad Moon Rising' inexplicably playing low as a burr on the half broken speakers, Dean abandons his place at the foot of the stereo, climbing onto the bed and lying Castiel down so that his head rests in Dean's lap. Half sitting, half lying himself, Dean strokes idle fingers through his hair.

Castiel lets his eyes close, it's been...well, since he was a child, since someone petted him in such a way. Whilst some part of him is disconcerted by the fact that he's allowing it to happen, the rest of him is content with Dean's touches.

"So what did you do, when you were my age?" He lies down next to him on his belly, not touching Castiel, save for his hand, linking their fingers. "What were you like?...seventeen year old Cas?" Castiel sighs.

"Dull I suppose...I liked to read, play chess..." He sighs and closes his eyes, listening to the music.

"Read what?" Dean presses.

"Oh...anything." he can feel Dean's fingers tracing his palm. "Science fiction, gothic horror, philosophy, dime novellas..."

"You ever read 'Christine'?"

"The Stephen King novel? Of course, you like it?" he opens his eyes and tips his head slightly to look at the boy.

"Dude, killer car, what's not to like?" Dean shifts slightly, laying his arm around the priest's waist. "Did you watch the movie? Because I have it...I could bring it for you, next time."

"I'd like that." Castiel smiles at him and they just lie like that, face to face, Dean's arm over him, his head leaning on Castiel's outstretched arm, listening to the tape slowly spool over into silence.

Dean begins to excuse himself from home as much as he can without arousing suspicion. He goes to Castiel's home for an hour after school most days, claiming that he likes to walk the long way home now. After dinner some nights he excuses himself to go for a run, sprinting back home so he looks tired afterwards.

The evenings he spends with the priest are glorious. They usually start with dinner, that is, dinner for Castiel, which Dean helps him to make and then watches him eat, usually with a backing of whatever tape he's made up for him out of his records.

They've already watched 'Christine' 'Carrie' and 'Salem's Lot' lying close to each other on the bed but being careful to restrict themselves to touching only each other's arms, hands, faces, a palm smoothed over Dean's back while he rests on his elbows, wrapping his arms around Castiel during a particularly scary portion of that nights feature. They know their limits and neither wants to test them.

Castiel also has a rather large collection of novels, which Dean only discovers on his third visit.

"Seriously? You've read all of these?" He plucks down a copy of 'Let The Right One In' and flips through it.

"I have a lot of spare time." Dean looks up at him, and then tugs him down onto the couch, sitting in front of him.

"Read to me?"

Castiel frowns. "Why would you want..."

"I like your voice...and I...I never hear you read just to me, it's always in church." He mutters. Castiel looks at him for a moment more before opening the book,

"_It makes you think of coconut-frosted cookies, maybe drugs. 'A respectable life'. You think subway station, suburb. Probably nothing else comes to mind. People must live there, just like they do in other places. That was why it was built, after all, so that people would have somewhere to live."_

Dean listens, enraptured as much by the priest's voice as by the steadily unfolding horror of the narrative as it dissolves into a full vampire story. Somewhere during his recitation, Castiel feels Dean lie down on the couch, head on his thigh. The contact skirts what he can bear, but he focuses on the line on the page and soon the warm weight of Dean fades to a comforting presence only, not the fierce heat that made his groin ache with tension.

They finish the book within a week and soon the readings are added to their routine. After the movies that Dean brings to him, Castiel selects books to read and Dean lies in his lap to listen and interject with his comments on the characters or where he thinks the story is headed. Sometimes Dean takes the book from him and lays Castiel down, reading a chapter or two so that he can rest his voice.

They argue about some things, that Dean spends too much time with him, and therefore risks his parents becoming suspicious is one of Castiel's main points of contention. But they are not so serious that they cannot be soothed with a stretch of silence and an apology. Dean continues to visit, and Castiel's feelings continue to grow, matching the boy's gaining affections.

They part on all occasions inside the hall, out of sight of the windows in the porch, and Castiel allows himself a brief kiss to the boy's forehead, feeling Dean's mouth on his knuckles afterwards, or else, pressing against his cheek.

It is the most innocent that he can be, these meetings which gratify their need for intimacy, for each other's company and conversation. Castiel knows that there is something else between them that he cannot entertain, but it is all right for a few hours to pretend that they are like any other kind of lovers. He is grateful for that.

Dean himself is enjoying this arrangement more than he originally thought he would. But Castiel is genuinely interesting, their nights together much more than just conversation because he's blown away by him, by his thoughts and his voice and the way he watches things intently like he's really trying to work them out. The way he pretty much whoops Dean at chess every time, and then explains why he did it, so he never makes the same mistakes twice.

He loves being with him, and he knows that it's right, that he was right to want it.

Which is the first time he's felt righteous in a good long time, and the first time he knows he's not hurting Castiel with his presence.


	10. Chapter 10

"_He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steams for lunch and vapours for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood..."_

"Castiel?"

He looked down at the boy, lying in his lap and looking up at him. The hand that isn't holding the book in front of him is enmeshed in Dean's hair, ruffling it and smoothing it flat and tidy again.

"Yes?" he folds the pages of 'Fahrenheit 451' closed one handed and lays the book to one side.

"Can I ask you something, promise you won't just say no."

Castiel looks down at his nervous face.

"Of course Dean."

"Would it be alright if I wanted...if I wanted to spend the night?"

Castiel's hands freeze and Dean feels his legs stiffen, thighs no longer slightly parted beneath his head but pressed together in sudden unease.

"Dean..." He moves out from under Dean and goes to sit awkwardly on the chair facing the couch. Dean sits up. "You know we can't, that..."

"I don't mean for sex." Dean reaches towards his hand, closing his warm fingers around Castiel's own. "I just want to stay with you...please?"

"We can't." Castiel grips his hand with his own and tries to press all the feeling he can into that one, tiny, gesture. "We're not...I'm not, strong enough, Dean, I'm sorry."

Dean frowns, inching off the couch to kneel in front of him, hand resting on his knee, the other still in Castiel's grasp. Castiel watches him with unease, breath catching in him as he looks down at the boy, on his knees before him.

"You told me I was stronger than I thought." Dean presses his lips to Castiel's hand, and the priest is ashamed, truly ashamed of what such an innocent gesture makes of him. "I trust you. I love you, and every night I still go home, and you're here alone." Castiel's fingers twitch in his. "Let me stay with you."

"Dean..."

"Trust me." He asks simply. And Castiel cannot turn from such earnestness.

"I'd..." Castiel smiles slightly. "I'd love for you to stay."

They return to their previous position, only now in the reverse. Dean picks up the reading where Castiel left off, the priest's head pillowed in his lap.

That's how Dean ends up walking towards the church, bag slung over his shoulder containing new pyjamas and his toothbrush, his parents appeased with the knowledge that he and a friend, Rufus, are camping out.

Castiel changes the sheets on his bed, laying them clean and flat. He fingers the hem of his T-shirt nervously, Dean has asked for this and he has acquiesced, because for the first time in his life he has the chance to lie beside someone, to sleep in another's arms and not wake alone. That alone is worth the risk, the temptation, of allowing the boy into his bed.

Dean helps him to cook, baked chicken and potatoes, his bag lying in the hallway, for the moment forgotten. Dean changes the tapes in the machine, long since moved to the kitchen, playing his music softly as they crush herbs and peel vegetables.

Castiel eats in front of the television, cross legged on the bed, Dean propped against the headboard beside him. The film tonight is 'The Last Crusade' and they watch it to the final credit sequence, Dean tucked into Castiel's side, fingers stroking his wrist absently.

This is usually where they would go to make tea, curling up to read the last of 'Fahrenheit 451' and then Dean would catch Castiel looking at the clock on the wall, and he'd leave to jog home and sleep in his own neglected mess of a room.

Instead Dean presses a quick kiss to Castiel's temple, before getting off the bed and turning the television off.

"How about we read up here tonight?" he says quietly.

Castiel looks at him for a long moment, indecision running riotously across his features, before he nods.

"I'll get the book, and bring some tea up..." Dean swallows nervously, stomach tightening with anxiety and expectation. "You want to...get changed?"

Castiel nods again and once Dean has gone, loping down the stairs to retrieve the paperback and two mugs of tea, he finds a pair of blue striped cotton pants and an old grey T-shirt with long sleeves, changing quickly and putting his clothes in order on the chair in the corner of the room. In the thin cotton he feels vulnerable, obvious. He considers getting under the sheets but that seems presumptuous, and he wonders at the effect of the boy on him, that he can consider himself presumptuous in his own house.

When Dean returns, Castiel is still sitting awkwardly on the edge of his bed. He glances at him, sets the cups down on the side table and drops the book onto the bed before climbing on himself and tugging Castiel towards the middle of the mattress.

"Relax, it's going to be fine." He lays him back against the stacked pillows and then hops off the bed, back to his discarded bag. "I'll change in the bathroom."

He returns in dark blue pyjamas, the long sleeve shirt of them buttoned down the front and making him look younger than he already is. He slides onto the mattress beside the priest and lies down, head resting just slightly on his chest. Castiel finds the edge of the book with his fingers, pulling it into his lap and opening it to the correct page.

"_He hesitated to leave the comforting flow of the water. He expected the Hound there. Suddenly the trees might blow under a great wind of helicopters._

_But there was only the normal autumn wind high up, going by like another river..."_

Dean listens to the words, turned out softly in the priest's voice, and Castiel loses himself to the story of Montag and the rhythm of his own reading. There is very little of the book left to read and Castiel makes short work of it, being a natural orator and stumbling very little over the narrative. Dean turns more into his side, an arm slung over his hips and his eyes closed. He sighs a long breath as Castiel rounds off the last sentences.

His eyes turn to the clock by his bedside, the time is almost midnight, and Dean has stayed the latest he has ever permitted himself. As if reading his mind the boy shifts slightly, eyes opening and finding his in the near dark that has formed outside of the circle of the reading lamp.

"We should sleep." He says, and Castiel feels the weight of this moment cement around them. He has already allowed so much, both to himself and to Dean. This is one more slip, and he is so afraid that he will not keep himself in check.

Still, when the boy slips away from him and turns over the sheets, taking the side of the bed Castiel does not usually occupy and leaning up on one elbow to draw him under the covers as well, he goes.

"Goodnight Dean." He lies on his side, close enough to feel the warmth that bleeds from him into the bed. Close enough that Dean can feel the weight of him only inches from him.

"Night Castiel."

And still they do not sleep, until Dean's arm finds his waist again, and Castiel extends his own to hold Dean's head in the hollow his elbow.

"Thank you, for this." Dean mutters, mouth warm against the cotton covered skin of his arm.

"It's not a sacrifice." His voice is slightly roughened by the extended reading, his eyes already heavy with sleep. "I enjoy this, you, so much." The arm around his waist pulls slightly tighter, and Castiel shifts just a little further towards the boy, bodies still unconnected save for the two points of contact that they are allowed. "I love you, you know that." He feels the boy burrow further into the pillow, seeking more warm limb to press his face against.

"I love you too, Cas."


	11. Chapter 11

He wakes in stages, first aware of the soft cotton against his skin, the cocoon of warmth it has formed. Then the soft light coming through the yellow curtains, and finally the hot weight of Dean, lying on his back beside him. He's managed to curl himself up at the boys side, head resting on his chest, Dean's arm around his back. Their legs are tangled together under the covers, and yet, he's mercifully (he almost thinks 'miraculously') unaroused, soft and calm at the his side.

Dean wakes with the suddenness of youth, one moment asleep, the next fully awake and aware. His arm twitches against the priest and he turns his head into the soft dark hair by his chin, sleep tousled and sticking up at odd angles.

"Morning." He wraps his arms and legs around Castiel's body before the priest can roll out of his space. "Told you we'd be fine."

Castiel hums softly and breathes in the scent of Dean's skin, feeling his collar bone pressing into his cheek. He feels amazingly calm for the moment, though he has the feeling it won't last. But right now there is no trace of lust in him, just the sense that he is marvelling in a respite, in warmth and the aftermath of sleep.

"I believed you." He mutters, hand stroking the fabric covered expanse of Dean's stomach.

"I should get home." Dean stretches slightly, "I might have time to make you breakfast before I go."

Neither of them moves.

"Can we do this again?" Castiel asks tentatively. "Just this...maybe in a few weeks..."

"Yes." Dean squeezes him slightly. "I thought you might not want to."

Castiel moves just enough to kiss his jaw, morning stubble scratching Dean's relatively smooth skin.

"I'd never regret anything you gave me, as long as it didn't hurt us...hurt you." Castiel feels his guilt, his unease resurfacing.

"You're not so dangerous." Dean kisses him, just touching the side of his mouth. With a sigh he untangles them and slides out of bed. "Pancakes then?"

Dressed once more in his jeans and T-shirt, watching Dean, similarly attired, as he flips pancakes and ladles batter in his small kitchen, Castiel feels the closeness of that earlier, bed bound moment being buried underneath normality and distance. But it isn't gone, it's a new connection that refuses to dissipate, and he wonders to what extent they are now tied together, whether he could give up this closeness, this relationship. The knowledge that to do so would hurt him deeply, is not surprising but it does disturb him to know that somehow they have solidified, coming together as often as they have in affection.

They eat the pancakes and then it is time for Dean to leave. He kisses Castiel as they stand in the shadowy hallway, a quick press of lips to the side of his face.

"I'll see you soon." He picks up his bag.

"At mass, actually." Castiel points out.

He still hasn't gotten used to seeing Dean amongst others, feeling that a single look, a single slip of the tongue over his reading, will spell disaster for them both. Mass is now something of a trial, knowing that Dean is watching him and listening to him from the crowd.

Thankfully his lust, now grounded in true emotion, is a little easier to bear. Feeling that he has some grasp on Dean, that he knows him and that his feelings are returned, somehow makes him less desperate to simply feel him, to take him.

Still, the feel of the boy's eyes on him is as electric as it has always been, and Castiel finds himself aching under it, grateful for the protection of the lectern and cursing the lengthiness of the ceremony.

Dean himself sits in the pew beside his Mother and Father, his brother standing with the other members of the choir. He looks up at Castiel and feels the priests eyes dart to him on more than one occasion. Despite the domestic nature of their time together, Dean cannot suppress his knowledge of sex, or his desire for it. When Castiel looks at him again Dean's in the process of wetting his lips, tongue sweeping over them automatically, but seeing the priest's eyes widen imperceptibly to all but him, he runs his tongue over his lip again, resting his teeth on its damp fullness when he's done.

Castiel swallows and glances down at the book in front of him.

Dean feels his cock slowly growing plump with blood.

In confession, because he must still attend confession, Castiel sighs brokenly and turns his face towards the grille.

"That was an unfair thing, to do." He swallows. "A dangerous thing to do."

"No one saw me." Dean curls up at the displeasure in the priest's voice.

"It is not about them...it is about me and you and..." he sighs. "How do you think it makes me feel, to see you do things like that?" he almost whispers, voice husked with desire and frustration.

Dean's breath comes in audible rushes, and he can feel his heart thumping under his ribs.

"I didn't mean to." He's telling the truth, he doesn't really understand why he did it. "I'm not trying to tempt you, I promise."

"You don't have to try." The priest's words are filled with self loathing. "I'm already...I already find you far too arousing...and perhaps..."

"No." Dean would shout it if he did not know that other people were still in the church. "No...you can't say we have to stop. I need you." He means it in its rawest sense, it feels like he'll go mad without seeing the priest alone.

Castiel sits in pained silence.

"Let me prove it." Dean says suddenly. "You're not a danger to me, or my soul."

Castiel feels a sudden spike of extreme unease.

"You slept next to me, Castiel...and you were fine, we're fine."

"Dean you realise what this means to me? What our own self control means for us? If we fail in this..." Castiel has seen images of Hell, and none of them, not one, has captured the perdition of his teachings. He will not be the man to consign Dean to such a place.

"You're the most controlled person I know...and I can control myself. I can." He insists as if Castiel had doubted him verbally.

"I'll think on it...you should be going." Castiel moves back from the grille, hearing Dean pause before leaving.

"I love you Cas."

"I love you too...I wish this was easier." Castiel hears the boy depart, and waits for the next penitent to enter.

He wishes there was to be an end to the trials, that at some point he could have enough of Dean. Reach a point where he no longer wanted more than he was strictly allowed to want.

He's starting to realise there will never come a point where he can rest, knowing he's had his fill of the boy. There is no intimacy that he can allow which will sate the thing that draws them together.

He takes confession and prays inwardly for salvation.


	12. Chapter 12

Dean keeps to their scheduled meetings, coming by in the evenings and helping him to prepare his meals. They work their way through a box set of Dr. Sexy (MD) and Castiel is quite sure it's the worst thing he's ever been subjected to, and tells Dean this unflinchingly.

"You have no taste." Dean flicks a potato chip at him and proceeds to defend the show to the hilt. As bad as the drama is, Castiel enjoys the way Dean knows all the plot lines and characters, and yet vehemently protests being called a 'fan' or even any suggestion that he might like the show for anything other than the big scale plane crashes and ship wrecks that seem to happen on a weekly basis.

Nothing is said of Dean's promise to prove that neither of them is going to succumb any time soon. He's glad of that; he doesn't think he could take the strain of it.

Though Dean has yet to sleep over again they have adjusted their routine to involve lying in bed, transferring their readings upstairs or else just talking, clothed and comfortable beneath the blankets.

There is so much Castiel wants to know of Dean's life. It's a life just barely beginning and he has so many dreams for it, so many opportunities just waiting to be presented, and yet Castiel can't help but think that maybe, by the time Dean reaches his own age, he will have settled in with a wife and be having children.

It becomes increasingly obvious that though their present is marginally comfortable, they can have no future. Castiel will never be able to live with a younger man, even when Dean comes of age, it would be seen as inappropriate. He can never be anything to Dean in public, save for his priest.

"Don't think like that." Dean tells him, when Castiel voices his thoughts on the matter. "We'll work it out when it happens."

"You're going to go to college in under a year." Castiel points out. "and I'll still be here."

"And I can write, and visit and..." Dean is frustrated by this obstacle. "And we will cope with it."

"What about children? Even the possibility of waking up beside someone in the morning, sharing a home..." Castiel sighs "Dean, we can't even share a pet, and we'll never share a space because it would be frowned upon...and even if it wasn't." His desperation laces his tone. "Can you imagine sharing a bedroom with someone...and still changing in separate rooms? Wearing night clothes even in the height of summer because..." he shakes his head bitterly. "Because I cannot be allowed to see you naked?" He almost whispers it, shame evident in every aspect of his posture.

Dean slides across the bed and touches his face.

"Why not?"

Castiel's eyes fly to his in an instant.

"I've seen you, remember?" Dean refuses to relinquish his hold on the other man's gaze. "I pulled you out of that tub and it never even occurred to me to touch you like that. And you are a lot better at this than me."

"If you were unconscious and hurt then yes, of course I'd be preoccupied." Castiel mutters with exasperation. "But lying with you, naked, is not...it pushes us too far and I would be concerned for you. For both of us."

Dean sits very still for a moment, blankets pooled in his lap, then he reaches for the hem of his T-shirt, pulling it over his head and fisting the fabric nervously, holding it in one hand.

If Castiel found him tempting, found the sight of the boy unequivocally beautiful, when clothed, it is nothing compared to the bare skin of him. Dean's chest is lightly tanned from the previous summer, fading but still present, each part of him is toned and still slightly rounded with youth, the skin soft and even. He drinks in the sight of him guiltily even as Dean's uncertain fingers reach for the waist of his pyjama pants, the only item of clothing Dean is still wearing.

"Dean. Don't." Castiel says, but he can't muster the strength to sound foreboding, because Dean is arresting in this condition, half naked and so, so close. Castiel cannot find a way to deny the impulse to uncover him further.

And so when Dean slides his thin cotton pants down over his thighs and knees, leaning up to work them down his calves and off over his feet...Castiel cannot tell him to stop. The words die in his throat.

Dean. Naked...is a sight that would drive him mad if he weren't already there, evidenced by his willingness to choose this, to allow this to happen.

He is the same even tone, brown paling to white on the parts of him that are shielded from the sun always. The hair on his chest, arms and legs is almost invisible, gleaming burnt brown as his limbs move with his pulse. That leading down his belly and lining his groin is darker, though, he notices abstractly, not as dark as his own, the only other such body he has ever seen this close.

His ankles and wrists are oddly delicate, his shoulders broad, pectorals defined and his lips parted slightly as his eyes fix on Castiel's, watching as he is watched. His eyes are drawn back to Dean's groin, taking in the sight as it begins to swell, slowly, reddening under a gaze Dean has so often seen focussed on the bowed heads of celebrants or the words of a psalm, and has wanted on him for so long. It's almost unbearable in its intensity.

Dean leans forwards and wraps his hands in the fabric of the priest's T-shirt, pulling it slowly upwards over the other man's head. Castiel raises his arms to let the fabric pass over him, swallowing hard now that he is bared to the boys gaze, feeling it rake over him like a touch. And he isn't, touching, save for the removal of his shirt they have yet to touch each other, and yet Dean continues to harden, and Castiel feels an answering pool of warmth in his abdomen.

Castiel leans back against the pillows, partly to gain some distance, and partly to do something, anything, that isn't crushing his own bared flesh to Dean's.

"Castiel...I..." and he sees unease flicker in the boys expression, nervousness and awkwardness stiffening his posture as he draws his knees up to his chest, sheltering the arousal that suddenly embarrasses him. "I'm sorry...if you want...I can...I can go."

This is how he ends up reaching for the boy, turning him and moulding his body to his naked back so that he can hold his curled up form against his own. Castiel threads his fingers into the boys hair, keeping his other arm clear of Dean's naked skin.

"I would never make you leave." He murmurs, feeling the tension and upset radiating from Dean's naked body, vulnerable and flushed, exposed to him so freely it makes him ache. He lifts a sheet over Dean, watching it settle over him, giving him some measure of protection, before moving away. Dean turns to track his progress, and goes still when he sees Castiel slowly dragging the waistband of his own pyjamas down over his hips. When the boy makes no sound or sign to show he is disturbed, Castiel continues with the action, laying himself naked before Dean's eyes.

Dean will never be able to accurately and eloquently describe what he feels at this precise moment. Because it is one thing for Castiel to look on his naked body and find it beautiful, but another for a boy to look on the body of an older man and feel...want, coursing deeply and yet so near the surface. He sees the tapered hipbones, trails and shadows of dark hair, the steady beat of a pulse in the pale skin of his throat, the slightly hardened flesh between his legs, purpling at the tip, and the long, elegant legs so often concealed beneath robes and suplice. He sees all of him, and he wants, more than he can bear, and more than he has hope of resisting.

The sheet is crushed under his back before he has conscious thought, and he falls on Castiel in a tangle of hot skin, the alternate smooth-rough play of hairs standing on end and the slight dampness of sweat on them both. Castiel's body jerks at his first touch, as their chests seal together, legs tangled, brown, white, brown, white as Dean shifts on top of him. He moans when the boy's mouth finds his, pressing blindly into the first kiss they've shared since Dean pleaded with him for some measure of intimacy. And now there is this. Everything.

Dean's hands can't stop touching Castiel's skin, running over him, rubbing, squeezing and soothing alternately as the other man touches him with awe stricken greed. Gasping for breath every time their mouths part they snatch air before pressing together again, and Castiel thinks he might never get the taste of Dean out of his mouth, so deeply it's gone.

It's too much and not enough, and too soon Castiel feels Dean resting between his legs, shifting with frustration, tiny sounds of discontent and desire caught in his throat. He wraps his legs around Dean and wants with more power than he thought he possessed, he wants this.

"Can we...?" Dean pants, flushed and glazed in sweat, mouth swollen and eyes half closed in hazy need. "Can I?"

Castiel can only nod, kissing again in a rush of teeth and bitten lips, the taste of saliva shared between them, the raw taste of Dean's mouth.

"I need to get something...something to..." Another nod, hands dragging down the boys back and circling his waist. Dean whimpers and bucks against him involuntarily, they're both coming apart and Castiel feels a spike of fear that he is no longer in control of this, of himself.

Naked, Dean scrambles out of bed and pads swiftly across the floor, out onto the landing and towards the bathroom. Alone, Castiel pulls the sheets around himself, frustrated and anxious, afraid and hard and lost as to where they're going.

At the same time, he knows exactly what is going to happen.

And that frightens him all the more.

Dean returns, slowly opening the door and standing, unsure, on the threshold, bottle of lotion in one hand, the hard line of his erection shadowed against his stomach. Castiel feels himself twitch distinctly, a thickness to his throat as he nods, and raises an arm towards Dean as he approaches the bed. Castiel wraps the arm around the boy and pulls him closer, kissing his forehead, his mouth, his throat. He's warm and close and perfectly smooth, even the hair trailing his stomach is soft, Castiel clings to him and tries valiantly to fight himself.

There's no pause as they work out how this will go. Castiel lies down, his eyes travel over the boy's body, taught and smooth and beautiful. When Dean covers his shaking fingers in grease, Castiel feels answering tremors in his spine. Their eyes meet and Dean parts him slowly, hearing Castiel gasp over his own ragged breath. His finger presses against the innocent pink pucker there, the tiniest amount of pressure is all he can summon. He can barely think the word 'penetrate' he can hardly dare to press into him.

"Castiel..." He looks up into the blue eyes fixed on him. "Don't hate me." Are the only words he can put forth. He doesn't want him to despise him for wanting this, for bringing them both to this, knowing it would break them, that it could still break them – and wanting it all the same.

He can't stand to hear the answer, so he goes on, falling, failing.

"Oh" Castiel makes the tiny sound as the curved pad of Dean's finger breaches him, then, "U-uh..." as it works its way inside. Dean whimpers, shifting so that his other hand and touch his weeping arousal. He can't look away from the ring of tight pink flesh that flirts with the length of his finger, flickering open just slightly around it, pulling and pushing alternately as the muscle clenches.

"Oh Castiel..." The boy's hand touches his penis again, stroking inexpertly as he opens him up, and Castiel feels himself _give _to the pressure, opening up, preparing.

When he's considered this, in his more vulnerable moments of self indulgence, it was always with a view to the animal. The carnal, unnatural actions of one man debasing himself for another. On hands and knees, whoring oneself like a Godless creature, without reason, without morality, only with desire. And it frightened him, truly frightened him to his core, that he might be like that. That, given the right circumstances, the wrongness inside of him might break free, sweeping all else in its path and leaving him, begging on his knees, for the rutting force of someone, anyone else, or worse, forcing himself inside someone's willing body, using it for something so base it didn't deserve a name. In a righteous world it would not have a name at all, if all men were good and faithful, there would be no need for the term 'sodomy'.

It is not like that at all.

It hurts, there's pain as he expected there to be, even a moment where he's aware of what is taking place in all its anatomical horror, he can feel the boy's _knuckle_ inside of him, pressing into the wall of his backside. The curved bluntness of the finger tip with a hard edge of nail. He can feel them, know how they are intruding on him, and feel a shudder of shame and disgust.

He did not expect to feel so good with Dean finally inside of him. So full and hot and reduced to only the simplest of wants, to have Dean so close to him, to feel so much of him. As Dean pushed inside he'd heard the boy moan, long and low, and now Dean mutters into his throat, head bowed and back shaking with tension. "I didn't...oh fuck, I didn't know it would feel like this..." He shifts until his forehead is pressed to Castiel's, and the priest hears him speak, feeling warm breath on his face. "It's so...tight...Castiel..." he trails into a low groan as he moves a little. "So tight...I can't..." The boy lets out a sound that might almost be a sob, and begins to move in earnest.

And Castiel can remember every disgusting thing he has ever thought, ever uttered, about this...this practice. But for the life of him he cannot call the feeling of Dean's body fetching against his, the boy's organ filling him and moving urgently, thick, inside of him – wrong. Neither can he term it ugly or base. Not when he feels his body begin to move with Dean's, when the only sounds he can produce are moans to match those of the young body atop his own, as he spreads wider and feels the deeper penetration draw more delicious sounds from Dean, as he himself whimpers and groans with each slick slide of him.

Dean begins to move with short abortive thrusts, the harsh, 'Huhn...huh...uh..." of his breath grounded in the inside of Castiel's shoulder. The priest raises his hips, thrusting back into the feel of the boys soft belly, rocking against his erection which aches more than it ever has, smearing wet, sticky trails against the soft youthful skin that touches him.

"Yes." Dean bucks into him and groans against his chest, then again, pained sounding "Ye-s" He moves jerkily and Castiel can feel him twitch inside of him, rubbing, nudging at the place inside of him that feels like someone's reaching into him and rubbing along every nerve. "Oh, _Yes_" Dean lurches again, hands clinging to him, one tangled in the priest's hair as he pulls their mouths together. Castiel's erection prods his stomach insistently, rubbing and twitching in its own slickness.

Castiel makes a noise, because it cannot have ever been a word, not like this. Hand sliding between his own shuddering abdomen and the contorted muscle's of Dean's stomach, to stroke himself, fingers rolling the skin and becoming sticky, smeared and wet as he pulls himself.

"Oh" Dean pants harshly and changes his angle, trying, impossibly to anchor himself deeper, even as Castiel arches into the new pressure, the new sensation of his most private nerves being battered with velvet soft hardness, slicked and effortless with lubricant. His hand clenches around himself and he makes a desperate sound, frustrated on the edge of release.

"Yes..." Dean's pace picks up, losing its careful rhythm as he comes apart, groaning, grunting the mindless word into the side of his neck as he loses himself. "Yes...yes...oh...yes..." and comes with a bone deep moan as he thrusts once more, as deep as he can get, knees digging sharply into the box spring and hips surging up as his empties himself.

Castiel feels the first hot dart of liquid inside of him and pulls himself hard, feeling his body tense around Dean's softening length as another short burst of warmth bathes the inside of his body. He comes over his trembling fingers, head falling back against the bed as Dean's body shudders and goes limp on top of him, sealing sweat and semen between their shaking bodies.

He cups the back of Dean's head gently, feeling him pant against his chest as he lies supine, trying to get his breath back. His arm encircles his sweating back, holding him close as they both come down, shushing gently against his damp hair.

He could say that he would regret this come the morning, or that as soon as he regains control over his shuddering body he will move away from Dean, clothe himself and seek absolution, no matter how harsh the penance, he will do it.

But to be absolved, one must first be sorry.

Castiel is not sorry. He cannot bring himself to curse an act which brought him so close to the boy he loves. He cannot now believe, as he has done all his life, that God would hate him for this act and this act alone.

Had he taken a random man, anonymously, in an alley, or in his own bed. Had he not loved and felt himself transcend the pleasure of the act itself, and feel closer to Dean than to any other person in creation. Had he not continued to feel beyond the lifespan of their copulation. Then he could have called it sin. Sinning by doing wrong as according to the laws of God.

He cannot, for all his training, all his pains and penance and prayers, see being taken by Dean as an act against God.

For that, and that alone, he might find it in himself to be apologetic for.


	13. Chapter 13

_For those of you surprised (possibly disappointed?) with the sex in the last chapter, then I'm sorry, but I had it planned for a while (I've been writing it for a week and a half in a separate document) and I really felt it was the next stage in a healthy relationship._

Castiel wakes only an hour after he falls asleep, bolting awake with the knowledge that Dean should have been home by now.

The bed is empty.

For a second the knowledge punches him in the stomach, and all he wants to do is curl up and close his eyes to the sight of the empty space beside him.

Then he hears Dean's voice, coming from the hallway.

"...Yeah, I know I should have called sooner, I'm sorry I just lost track of time..." He sighs. "I'll be back tomorrow before school, I promise...yeah, I'll tell Rufus you're not happy...Night Mom." He hears the snap of a cell phone closing and then Dean appears in the doorway, naked and looking distinctly nervous. He stops short when he sees that Castiel is awake.

"My Mom would have wondered where I was..." he gestures sheepishly with the phone. "figured I'd tell her I was with Rufus...I can get him to cover for me tomorrow...tell him I was off with some chick." He breathes out shakily. "Are we ok?"

Castiel leans up on his elbow.

"Come back to bed." He says quietly. And the boy does, slowly climbing up onto the bed and getting underneath the blankets, pressing his cooling limbs hesitantly against Castiel's naked body. His head rests neatly under his jaw and he sighs into Castiel's skin brokenly.

"I'm so sorry Cas...I didn't mean to." Castiel feels a drop of warm liquid strike his skin and realises that Dean is crying.

The realisation is like a knife in his throat.

He moves so that he can see the boy's face, stricken and run across with tears. Stroking a hand hesitantly through his hair he realises with awful suddenness that Dean is seventeen, seventeen and, like himself, had been a virgin until the small hours of that morning.

"Dean...I..." he holds the boys shaking body and tries to fight the nausea that fills him when he thinks what people would say if they knew what he'd done. Ugly things. Terrible things, all of which would be true.

He's stolen the innocence from a boy not yet of age.

"Dean I'm so sorry I hurt you." He feels his heart seize up at the words. "I'm...I can't fix this...I'm so sorry...please..." Dean shakes his head violently.

"You didn't...how can you think that?" He whines softly, pressing if anything, closer to Castiel's body and holding him tightly. "I'm the one who...I took my clothes off for you." He murmurs, self disgust evident in his words. "I'm the one who kissed you...I was..." he blushes furiously and closes his eyes. "I was inside of you...that was all me and now..." he buries his face in the side of Castiel's neck, hating himself but unwilling to give up the comfort of the priest's touch. "Now I've screwed it all up and I've lost you and...and we've sinned...you sinned because of me."

"I said that I couldn't regret anything you gave me." Castiel murmurs after a long while, stroking the flesh of Dean's upper arm. "If I didn't hurt you...I don't think I can be sorry." He closes his eyes. "That's a terrible thing for me to say...but I can't be sorry and if I can't regret...I can't seek penance."

"Don't say that." Dean sits up and stares down at him. "You can't just give up on...everything! You...you have to be absolved or..." he looks utterly broken. "You'll be damned for this, won't you? We both will."

"We..." Castiel cups his face, his other hand stroking the boy's hip and marvelling that now that the worst has happened he no longer has to be afraid that it will. "We will most likely be judged, both by God and by man, for what we have done here."

Dean shakes his head slowly, hurt and wanting not to believe that this, the act which had felt so right, so good, was going to end them both. "I'm sorry Father...I can't...I can't do anything to make this better can I?"

Castiel looks at him for a long moment, then draws him down and wraps his arms around him again, pressing them together gently.

"What we did felt...indescribably good. Because it was you... and I wouldn't be here with anyone else...I would never have let anyone touch me, the way you did. Please believe that." Dean nods against his clavicle, shaking slightly with suppressed misery. "I love you, and I'm sorry that it has come to this...but I have to consider what this means to my work here...I can't stay in service with this hanging over me. It wouldn't be right." He sighs as Dean goes suddenly still. "I will have to leave my station, and try to...try to make amends with God for what I've done...even if I can never atone for it, because I can't be absolved of a sin I don't regret."

"You're going to leave me?" Dean's voice is small and hurt.

"I can't stay." And Castiel hears his voice crack, despair washing into it even as he tries to remain calm. He has forgotten what it's like to be one man alone, without the weight of the church around him, and now he's considering a life without it he is lost, small and defenceless. His eyes blur and he feels his chest heave once, a sob just barely contained. "I can't stay and...Dean I can't be near you and not have this again, and every time...Every time. It would be a sin, just another sin on both of us." He buries his face in the teen's hair. "I love you too much to let that happen."

"I fucked it up." Dean shakes with misery and self loathing. "You were...you were perfect to me Cas and I...I fucked everything up."

"We're human." Castiel strokes his back. "We're human and it's human to want this...but it can't happen again."

They lie for a while in silence, Castiel trying not to crack under the weight of the misery he contains, Dean trying not to make this harder by trying to argue Castiel into staying. He knows it's a sin, he knows and he also realises that Castiel is right to move on, to leave temptation behind. But that doesn't mean he has to like it.

He isn't even aware that he's reacting to the warm body underneath him until Castiel shifts uneasily, like a spooked animal, and Dean feels his own erection drag across the priest's hip. He's a teenager and Castiel isn't, otherwise the older man has no doubt that he would be reacting in the same way to a warm, naked body, but Dean lurches away from him and curls up on the other side of the bed with his head buried in the pillows.

"Dean..." Castiel lays a hand on his shoulder and Dean shrugs it off.

"Don't, ok? Just...Don't touch me." His voice is strained and Castiel can hear him breathing, heavy and rough. "Why can't I just..." he hears a sound like a strangled sob, "You tell me you're leaving and I...I can't even lie here without..." he shifts uncomfortably, "I'm...sick, it's just...sick."

Castiel returns his hand to Dean's shoulder and this time Dean is too distracted to shove him off.

"You're not." He says quietly. "It's just..." he flushes despite himself. "It's beyond your control...it doesn't mean you're not sorry and it doesn't mean you're going to..." he can't finish the sentence, he can't fight the still fresh memory of Dean inside of him, telling him how he feels and groaning 'Yes' into his throat like he's dying of it.

"I still remember what you _feel _like, Cas." Dean whispers, layers of desire and disgust warring in his voice. "I'm losing you and all I can think is I'm never going to feel that again." He swallows thickly. "It should be more than that...I should be thinking about all the times I've seen you and all the things we've done...not the one time I couldn't...I couldn't stop." And it sounds more like an admission of guilt than the end of a rant.

Castiel curls close to his back, not touching, save for his hand on the boy's shoulder.

"I still love you."

Dean shakes his head, pressing it into the pillow to block out the words.

"I mean it." Castiel insists, quietly. "I've always meant it...and I'm never going to forget you, let alone hate you...so please don't hurt yourself over what I think of you." He squeezes his shoulder. "Because I'm never going to love anyone, as much as I love you."

Dean says nothing, just takes his hand from his shoulder and holds it, curled tightly in his own, pressing into the vulnerable softness of his stomach.

When it comes the reply is almost to quiet to hear.

"I love you, Castiel." Dean murmurs. "can I see you again? Before you go?"

"Of course." Castiel's smile wavers even as it's born. "I'd like that."


	14. Chapter 14

He barely makes it through the week.

There are things to sort out with his superiors, phone calls and meetings to suffer through as he makes his decision to leave the priesthood known. Every one of them tells him that they are surprised, aggrieved by his decision, probing lightly as to the cause of such upheaval.

He tells them nothing, brushes off their praise more out of shame than modesty, and orders a pack of cardboard boxes to contain his possessions when he moves from his home.

In between his attempts at packing, which usually end with him wandering from room to room looking at his possessions and wondering where the hell he's moving them to. He finds himself increasingly drawn to the altar. He kneels in his yard work jeans and T-shirt, closes his eyes and prays for help, for guidance and for forgiveness.

He can't really tell if he's receiving any of the things he begs for.

He boxes his books in two categories, things he has read for Dean and things he hasn't. The books he has read to Dean will stay in their sealed box indefinitely; it's too hard to look at them. Worse to consider throwing them out entirely.

The TV and VCR go into the church's jumble sale store, as does the stereo system he'd taken from there when he moved in. He never used either much before Dean, and he doesn't want them around now. The few tapes Dean made him go into the box of books, to be avoided but not lost entirely.

He looks through the apartment listings for the next town over and finds a modest single bedroom place over a drug store. He buys more jeans and T-shirts now that he will be spending more time in his own casual clothing. He even applies for a job at the local library there.

In short he does everything he can to paper over the fact that he's just lost the only man he will ever love.

Dean, for his part, stays away as he promised to do on the last morning they spoke. He knows Castiel won't leave for good without saying goodbye, and with only that small comfort he sets about his life sullenly and without much interest. He's lost his virginity, his friend, and his...well, Castiel was never a lover in the true sense of the word, neither a boyfriend, nor a partner. He was a confidant, a good man and a perfect person with which to spend his evenings, hell, even the rest of his life with.

And now he was leaving. How on earth could he make his peace with that? How could he explain it to the woebegone Sam, upset that his older brother no longer wants to play him at console games or take him over to the pool for swim practice? He hates making Sam feel that way, but he can't play at being a kid anymore, he's been through too much to believe that his parents can protect him from everything, or that a game of Mario could distract him from all his problems.

He avoids his parents for other reasons, scared that they might guess what it is that troubles him. He can do nothing to erase the pain he's caused Castiel, having cost him his home and his work and his calling, but he can let him leave town without dogs on his heels and a mob at his door.

There's school work he's meant to be doing, but he isn't really in the mood to focus. Then there's Rufus, Jo and Pamela, all of whom want to know what the fuck's gotten into him lately and why he's so miserable all of a sudden. He avoids them too.

Both Castiel and Dean keep themselves occupied whilst simultaneously shunning human contact. They strive for normalcy, for the paper thin facade that everything is fine, and that things between them, such as they were, are now over.

As Castiel has come to realise, pretence can only get you so far.

Castiel cannot forget Dean, and fears that if he allows himself to think of him for more than a second at a time, he will cancel all his best laid plans and fall back into bad habits – talking to the boy, seeing him, and wanting him. It cannot be allowed. And he won't allow it.

At night Dean still picture's Castiel's face, presses into the bunched duvet and can almost feel the contours of him. He can hear his voice reading and digs out his copy of 'Farenheit 451' to read over, chasing the ghost voice from his head with fresh words, reading aloud at two am until Sam comes into his room because he can hear him through the wall.

"Dean? What are you doing, it's like...nearly three in the morning." Sam perches on the end of his bed in his sea world T-shirt and dark green shorts. "And what are you wearing?"

Dean realises he's wearing his pyjamas, the ones he had to buy at K-mart to take to Castiel's because he usually slept in his underwear, if that. On impulse he flicks back to the page he's holding the book open at.

"You want to listen?" He whispers. Sam seems to weigh the strangeness of this against getting to spend time with Dean, he nods.

Dean starts to read again, answering Sam's questions about the story so far as he goes. It's nice, having someone to share this with, and he hopes this memory will be written over his time with Castiel, making it easier to suppress it later. He knows he's kidding himself though, the memories are too different, and spending some quality time with his little brother will never be the same as the way Castiel could hold his attention, undivided, for hours as he spun out the stories in his novels.

Although he felt guilty for wanting the man's body so much, for longing after a chance to lie with him again, naked and open. His wish to miss and hunger for his company as much as he wanted his physicality is granted in the cruellest way. He misses Castiel with a sharp loneliness which only grows when he is with others. He misses their odd conversations, the way Castiel would cock his head at movies and frown at the characters as if they were real people, the way he read and fussed over the cooking that they did together.

Once Sam is too tired to continue to pay attention, Dean sends him back to bed and curls up on his own beneath his single duvet. A whole dimension of his life is leaving him, and he is powerless to stop it. He's not even eighteen yet, and already he feels sick with the prospect of college, of dating, of getting a job and a house...all of it without Castiel, all of it alone, or worse – with someone else. A girl he will date just to keep face, to keep desire at bay.

That's how he's going to live.

He considers Castiel's future. A one roomed apartment and a boring job, no one to come home to, or cook with, or read to. Nothing and no one to live for, because he doesn't have his church, or God, not anymore.

Dean squeezes his eyes shut and tries not to upset himself, tries desperately to hold it in, because if he cries over how he's ruined Castiel's life, then he cries alone.


	15. Chapter 15

Dean goes to see Castiel the day before he's due to move. It was the last thing they'd agreed on before they'd broken company, and as the day had approached both of them had felt the strain. There was a desire for it to be over in both of them, but a desperate want to cling to what they'd had. By the time they stood face to face again, now for the last time, both felt exhausted, strung out and tense from the waiting.

There is to be no last minute reprieve for them, how can there be when there is no one forcing this? Nothing but their own knowledge that they cannot be together without the searchlight of suspicion and damnation throwing down light on them. There is no one to fight and nothing to overcome in this, because it's the truth of their situation that means they have to part.

The hopelessness of it weighs heavily on Castiel as he seals the last of his boxes.

Dean sits on a kitchen chair in the background, watching the last of the priests, the _ex_-priest's, things disappear beneath the flaps of cardboard and thick package tape.

"This is really happening, huh?"

Castiel folds his arms protectively.

"Yes...Dean I want to say..."

"Don't." He says sharply.

"Dean..."

"It's not going to be enough." Dean lifts himself off of the wooden chair and moves slowly to stand in front of him. "It's never been enough and...and now I'm never going to see you again so...so don't leave me with nothing."

"I can't...I can't give you anything else." Castiel meets his eyes feeling heavy with frustration and exhaustion. One last struggle with himself and then he's free, free to feel nothing.

He knows what's coming, has always known that neither of them could leave the other well enough alone. It's why he's here, surrounded by his life in boxes, it's why he has to leave. But...here is a chance to leave with one last memory, even if it is one teaming with regret.

Dean crushes their mouths together and sense memory drowns Castiel in the recollection of Dean, fully naked and pressed to him, into him, aligned in all the most perfect ways. His mouth opens to the boy and Dean sighs, pressing further against him until Castiel is backed into the wall, arms full of Dean, warm and inviting.

He surprises himself when he turns them, twisting to press Dean into the wall, his own body falling between the boy's legs as Dean sucks in air bluntly, barely letting their lips part as he rocks his hips against Castiel's. Dean's hands rake at his back, finding naked skin beneath his shirt and Castiel makes a small hungry sound at the back of his throat. This is all he's going to have, all he can let himself give, or take.

He moves just far enough away that they can calm themselves, resting together instead of rutting blindly, no long kissing but sharing breath as Dean's shoulder blades dig into the cool plaster of the wall.

He feels like a live wire inches from a copper filament, right up in Dean's space, lips so near his skin and moisture pooling in his mouth, heat spiking through him as their bodies brush at the height of their breathing.

Everything that's wrong with them, every danger they present to each other, exemplified in this one act. And yet it feels too good to ever let it go.

He lays his forehead on the curve of Dean's shoulder, breathes in the scent that inhabits his cotton T-shirt, and tries to cement this memory together so that he will never lose it. This is all he'll have until the day he dies, and he wants to savour it in all its sensual detail.

Dean's fingers wrap in his hair and the boy holds him tightly around the waist. He is silent for a moment before uttering the words that Castiel has been dreading, the final test to see if he ever had any righteousness in him.

"Don't go."

He shakes his head against the cradle of Dean's shoulder.

"Please don't go." His voice is hushed and strained. "Cas...I can't do this."

"We have to." He pulls back a little. "Please don't make this harder."

"We're never going to see each other again...how can you just stand there and tell me not to make this more difficult? It should be, it should be the hardest thing you ever do not just...not just a fucking inconvenience." He shoves away from Castiel and rubs his hand over his hair, shaking with anger.

"Dean that's not what I meant." Castiel watches Dean circle his piles of boxes uneasily.

"Really? Because that's what it sounds like." He crosses his arms. "You've found your way out of this and you can't wait to leave, fuck Cas it only took you a week to plan your exit route, and now you just want me to let you go?"

"Yes." Castiel's voice is low and tight.

"And I can't tell you how much...how much I need you here? Why the hell not?" He squares up to him and glares, but there's so much hurt behind his eyes.

"Because you have no idea how much I want to stay." Castiel sags under the weight of Dean's anger. "How much I wish this could be simple, but it's _not_." He grasps Dean's shoulders and curls his fingers around the soft skin and muscle beneath. "and if you ask me to stay? I just might...and that would be terrible for both of us."

"Why?" Dean's brow is deeply furrowed, his frame set, but the hopelessness in his voice is all youth.

"Because it would damage you...you're young and you shouldn't have to be..." he struggles for the word. "Exposed, to this, to me. It's a sin and it was so wrong of me to touch you and that...that there isn't a single soul who'd believe that I care for you...they'd think me a monster."

"It's not true." Dean shakes his head. "They wouldn't be right, they..." He shrugs Castiel's hands off of his shoulders, backing him up against the wall again. "I'm the one that did it, remember? I'm the one that..." He kisses him and Castiel can feel something breaking in his chest as he feels the boy's desperation. Dean breaks away and rests their foreheads together.

"Don't leave me."

"I'm sorry." And he can't think of anything else to say, but it doesn't matter. Dean understands everything that those two words mean. He buries his face in Castiel's shoulder, and he feels tears slowly soaking his shirt.

Later that day Castiel packs his boxes into his car. He wraps his arms around Dean in the shadow of his hallway, shushing him gently and trying futilely to memorise the way he feels and sounds and smells. As if a memory could ever be as lovely, as perfect, as the real thing.

He drives away from his home, from Dean, with a trunk full of boxes, no real idea of what he's going to do with himself, and a shirt marked with tracks of moisture.

He keeps his eyes resolutely on the road, because he knows that if he catches sight of Dean is his rear-view mirror he'll turn back, and damn them both.


	16. Chapter 16

Dean shuts the door behind him and sinks to the floor.

Home safe.

He really hadn't expected it to hurt this much, but then he should have known better. Losing a relationship, losing a partner, wasn't supposed to be easy, even he knew that. But somehow he hadn't expected it to affect him this much. He'd never really been that invested anyway, or so he'd persuaded himself. It was just curiosity, loneliness, maybe a touch of empathy.

And now it was over.

He stands up and checks to see if anyone else is home, but the place is empty, his roommate presumably having gone to class for once. Collapsing on his bed he wills himself not to think of Castiel.

It's pathetic, not to mention insulting, that not one hour after breaking things off with Michael he's back to thinking about a man he hasn't seen in years.

He curls up on his side and tells himself that it isn't really his fault he hadn't been able to go through with it, but then, it kind of is. Or at least it's his fault for leading Michael on for the five months they'd been dating.

He'd met him at the union bar and Michael was nice, tall, sandy haired and boyish. He'd offered to buy Dean a beer and, it being a college party he'd already had more than enough, but he'd said yes. Michael liked the college football games and he and Dean had the same taste in disaster movies. But he wasn't in love with him, which he'd begun to realise made all the difference.

He'd spent the summer that Castiel left skulking in the shallows of depression, and then he'd gone off to college, his personal black cloud tagging along for the ride. It was weird to be around people who not only drank and smoked what it took him a while to identify as pot, but they also had a lot more sex than the other students in his high school, owing in part to the less religious atmosphere.

He even saw gay couples, men and women with their partners or one night stands, and it made him angry. At first he didn't really get why, but it slowly dawned on him that if he and Castiel had had the same upbringing, the same freedom as these people, then they could have been happy. That these couples had no notion or care for the hell they were facing after their deaths, and that's why they were so happy.

For two years he kept to himself, working on both his assignments and his growing despair about the way his life had formed. He'd been born gay, born with the urge to sin and raised with full knowledge of what that sin would cost. He'd reasoned that he could never be happy, but that he could be successful, content with his future career and comfortable with the trappings of such a life. A relationship, love, was to be beyond him. But he could still accomplish something, to make the time bearable.

And then he met Michael.

Their relationship started as an easy kind of acquaintance but when it began to slide into dating Dean tried not to notice. He hated being alone and Michael provided an easy distraction. It wasn't sinful, at least at first.

Michael was affectionate but not pushy and so it began with groping and kissing, which, after almost an entire adolescence spent in denial and restriction Dean took to quickly, feeling his desire amp up with each session of shirtless grinding.

He felt guilt, but that wasn't enough to stop him. He'd already lost so much to his infernal knowledge of hell and damnation, and surrounded as he was by ignorance and pleasure seeking couples, he was loath to allow himself time to think on it anymore.

They escalated into increasingly less hesitant hand jobs as they'd gotten to know each other, though Dean had cracked apart after the first time it happened, trying to cement himself back together with denial, that it didn't really count as sex.

His flimsy excuses started to fall down around him, and finally broke the first time Michael had teased his opening with a slick finger, asking for permission to continue.

Dean had bolted.

He'd spent over an hour in the cracked dorm room shower, somehow unable to stop picking up on a scent that didn't belong – beeswax and incense, that wouldn't go away. Images of Castiel crashed over him and he'd lost whatever comfortable denial he had – he had loved Castiel and that had made the sin, whilst not worth the damnation, at least partially worthy of his conflict over it. He had loved him so much that it hurt, and he'd sacrificed a great deal for him – to do this was an insult to both himself and Castiel's shattered life.

He had no care for Michael, and that made what he was doing all the worse, sinning without cause, with only desire for release on his mind.

He couldn't allow it to continue. And so he'd broken with him.

The end result? After having explained himself to Michael he had taken in the other boy's appalled look before the storm hit.

"Dean...that's sick."

He flinched a little internally, reminded of when he himself had used those words.

"Seriously, how can you believe that crap in this day and age?" Michael laid a hand on his shoulder. "It's not wrong to feel like this."

"According to what? You? The other guys like us, or all the people who seem to want to make everything acceptable and everyone equal?" Dean shakes his head. "Just because no one gets thrown in jail for it...just because people are starting to accept it, that doesn't make it right."

"Dean, get a grip, ok? This isn't healthy." Michael actually looked worried. "I mean, I knew you had some issues but I figured it was just your parents and some Sunday school crap...but you seriously believe that you're going to hell? That I'm going to hell"?

"Because it's true." Dean continues stubbornly. "I wish it wasn't but it is."

"Dean whoever drilled this into you? They were out of line and probably fucked up by their own parents...no God, especially not one who's supposed to love everyone, would make you this way and then torture you for it."

Dean's heard it before, tried to reason it before. But it doesn't help, and now, because whether he intended to or not, Michael has insulted Castiel, he's too pissed off to care much about his argument.

"You don't know what you're talking about." He says vehemently. "You think someone would tell me I'd be damned for this, if they didn't care about me?"

"I'm saying they'd have to be pretty twisted to put that on you, yeah."

"Maybe he was just trying to take care of me!" Dean finds himself yelling

Michael stares at him in silence for a moment.

"He?" He asks, hesitantly.

"Drop it." Dean snatches up his bag and gets up, "This was a stupid idea ok? It's over."

"Dean, you're clearly not over...whatever it was that made this way...whatever happened to you." Michael says gently. "You don't have to tell me, but you should talk to someone, because this kind of stuff doesn't go away."

"What stuff?" Dean counters protectively.

Michael looks at him sadly.

"Well...my Mom was abused as a kid and..."

"That's not what this is about." Dean grinds out. "I'm sorry that it happened to her, but nothing happened to me that I didn't want...I didn't do anything that I didn't want to do – and that's why it is all on me, ok? So leave it the fuck alone."

He'd slammed out of the room before Michael could reply.

Now he lies on his bed, trying not to think about Castiel as he has done for over three years, and failing miserably, just as he always has.

_The confessional booth is a familiar place to him, and though he is no stranger to doing things this way round, it still makes him uncomfortable. It reminds him of Dean, but that is after all why he is here. _

"_Forgive me Father for I have sinned, it has been over a month since my last confession." _

"_May the Lord bless you and keep you." The priest's voice comes through the grille. "Do you have anything to confess?"_

"_Yes."_

"_I take it things have not improved since the last we spoke?" _

_The penitent sighs. _

"_You could spare me the knowledge that you recognise me." _

_Castiel rubs his knuckles across his eyes._

"_I'm sorry, please continue."_

_He sighs._

"_I wish I didn't' think of him." Castiel leans heavily into the confessional seat, hands balled tight on the lap of his Sunday dress pants. "Every time...it's like it's just happened, like I'm still sinning."_

_Father Gabriel Milton sighs. _

"_My friend...you live a good life, you've been nothing but an asset to my congregation since you joined us, is it not time to let this go? To make your peace and turn it over to God?"_

"_I can't." Castiel can feel Gabriel's sympathy and frustration. "I can't make myself believe that every aspect of our relationship was sinful...I can't separate what was wrong from what we did right."_

"_I can't tell you that it was, you know that." Gabriel says gently. "But you sinned in love, not out of lust...perhaps that might make a different in the end."_

"_I don't believe it can." Castiel sighs. "If I let it go, if I make my peace with it...I'll want him again, I'll forget why it was a mistake."_

"_Forgive me for saying it...but you already want him, Castiel...that's why you're here." He stirs, robes shifting. "Perhaps a better place to discuss this would be in my office? Though...honestly I don't believe I can offer you anything you don't already know...but I could help, you could speak about it freely? Perhaps tell me the whole story."_

_Castiel is silent. _

"_You've been confessing to me since you moved here...and you have yet to tell me anything about your life before you came here, save for the fact that you were once a priest and you left the church because of an affair with a man."_

"_That's all there is." Castiel squeezes his hands tighter. He has not told Gabriel that Dean was not of age, that their relationship spanned months and was in the end an extensive bond. He doesn't want the man to think less of him, to lose the one friend he has._

"_I doubt that, no priest surrenders his work for a mere man...and there must be a reason you avoid speaking of him in detail."_

"_I can't..."_

"_I know, but think on it." Gabriel sighs. "I have other penitents to see today."_

"_My apologies."_

"_Nothing to apologise for, but I beg of you, let this go or you will suffer, needlessly."_

"_It's nothing more than I deserve."_

_Gabriel begins to reply but he hears Castiel's footfalls travelling away from the booth. He prays silently for his friend, walking the no-man's-land of self loathing and fear._

_It's been three years and still he lives in the shadow of his own sin._


	17. Chapter 17

Michael it turns out, is not so easily discouraged.

He waits the whole weekend before accosting Dean on his way to his English Lit class and trying to get through to him again. If he was just trying to get back together with him then at least Dean could call him a stalker and an asshole – but as it is he's just trying to get to the heart of Dean's discomfort with the tenacity of both a psyche major and a Catholic who has somehow 'made peace' with his sexuality.

Dean finds it by turns annoying and terrifying.

He doesn't want to talk about why he feels this way, that opens him up to talking about Castiel, to wanting Castiel. A sin of that magnitude is not something he can cope with, he's done it once, and he has promised himself (dark lonely days of self hate and nihilism not withstanding) that he will never fall into that great an error again.

He had tried to believe that he could have a physical relationship with Michael, because Dean was already marked with sin, so what did it matter? But he didn't love him enough, or perhaps at all, to make it worth losing himself. And after some consideration, he was frightened to discover how much he still believed that he could be redeemed, that giving up Castiel was the ultimate penance.

So no, Dean doesn't want to stir up anything that could ruin that.

Michael just wasn't prepared to let it slide.

"Dean!" He calls, hand finding his arm and leading him into an alcove.

"Let go of me." Dean shrugs him off and tries to leave for class, but Michael's in his way.

"No, just listen...I'm sorry about the other day." He shifts, scuffing his boots into the tiles on the floor. "I get it, I freaked you out...but please think about this, about what you're doing to yourself."

"I'm not doing anything." Dean growls. "Let me go to class."

"Take this." He shoves a plain paper pamphlet into his hand, smudgily printed in black. Dean glances down at it.

"What the fuck are you trying to do?" he crumples the leaflet one handed. "Michael, just let it go. It's nothing to do with you."

"Just, give it a shot Dean." Michael says sadly. "I'll see you around."

He disappears, leaving Dean with a handful of crumpled paper and a leaden stomach.

_Castiel shelves books lazily, feeling unconnected to his arms in the heat of the vents overhead. It's warm in the library, warmer than his apartment, and he luxuriates in the heat guiltily. Unwilling to move from the 'M' section and back to cooler climes. _

_He nudges the cart to one side with his hip, crouching to sort out a messy section of shelving, I.D. badge dangling over the tops of his thighs. Despite himself he quite likes this job, although it doesn't truly compare with the satisfaction of being a priest, of guiding souls towards the light of God...and yet where nothing is expected of him, ha cannot help but relax and feel that he is succeeding completely. As a priest he was always to be a partial failure, but here he can be perfect._

_His days now are fairly routine. He works five days a week in the library, goes home to his apartment and manages to cook something almost edible for his supper. On weekends he reads, lying on the couch in his living room, or else he goes to the flea market to buy new pans (because he burnt the bottoms out of his existing set) or new books, new audio books or new clothing. 'New' in all these cases being a term very much in the relative. He doesn't have much money, but then he has never had much in the way of finances or possessions._

_That at least hasn't changed much. _

_He has also managed to keep up with charitable work at least, thanks to Father Milton and his recommendations. Castiel works Friday nights at a soup kitchen, helping with can drives and sponsored events to raise money for both the church and its outreach programmes. He donates probably more than he can afford of his own money as well, and helps with whatever community project requires it, building the new annexe for the community centre or taking care of the public gardens. _

_It makes him feel better, doing these things, but ironically the praise he earns for these acts doesn't. In fact appreciation for his works makes him squirm with guilt because he isn't being entirely selfless in himself – so he avoids people as much as possible and so has, in the last three years, garnered the reputation of a reclusive, well meaning, oddball. _

_Which suites him fine. _

_He's not lonely in as much as he regularly sees people at work, while he's volunteering and at church, which he still attends faithfully. Still, he finds himself at this precise moment, hand hovering between 'Masters' and 'Macintosh' unable to recall the last time he had actually touched another person, or had been touched._

_Despite the pervasive heat around him he feel slightly chilled, realising that he could quite easily live out his days never being touched aside from the occasional brush of fingers when handing over money or being blessed by Father Milton._

_Filling up his days does a lot to distract him from the fact that his personal life is empty, and will remain that way. But sometimes it does not do enough. _

_His situation is not made easier by one of his colleagues, a dark haired woman named Ruby who often takes her breaks at the same time as he does and sits opposite him with her arms on the table, cleavage barely held by a succession of revealing tops. He's both flattered by the attention and deeply disturbed by it, having no wish to date her and not wanting to offend her or have to explain why this is the case._

_That night when he gets off work he lets himself into his apartment, feeling Montag, the fat ginger cat he acquired seemingly by accident a few weeks after he moved in, curling around his legs and mewling for food or attention. _

_Small needs simply met._

_Was there anything more soothing?_


	18. Chapter 18

_Short update, apologies, I'm just spread too thin._

Dean finds the pamphlet in his bag a week later, crushed under the weight of his English Lit reader. He hesitates over it, eyes flicking to the trash can in the corner of his room. It's stupid to hang onto the thing really, he has no intention of going. How can it possibly help him to hear other people like him attempt to fathom a way to be both gay and yet still go to heaven?

He knows already that it can't be done.

However, three texts and nine emails from Michael seem to suggest that he doesn't really have a choice. If going to this support group with him will get Michael off his back, then fine, he'll go.

He also has a lingering hope that perhaps going will help him to halt the confused notions that still remain with him, thoughts of Castiel and memories of their time together. He needs to know that it's over, has in reality been over for a long time, and perhaps meeting others like himself, still living in error even though they are, might help him to see how far he's come, and how much he still has left to lose.

The previous day he'd opened his reader to do an assignment, and found that it was on a portion of _'Fahrenheit 451' _He read the chunk of text, something about Montag's relationship with his wife which didn't quite register with his brain, then he'd closed the book and shoved it back into his bag, upset without fully understanding why.

Castiel was a long time ago. – It has become his mantra, he tells it over and over again without beads to count it. Castiel was a long time ago. Don't think about him. Castiel was a long time ago. I'm better now. Castiel was a long time ago...

I wonder where he is.

It's the question he comes back to over and over, along with 'Does he still think about me?' and always ending in the same flat prayer.

I hope he's ok.

_Castiel wakes up to his freezing cold apartment with heat blazing through him, disorientated and suddenly shivering as the sweat damp flesh of his chest connects with the cold air. He lies very still and wonders how many years it will take before he is physically unable to respond to these dreams, feeling the wet cotton of his boxers clinging hotly against his skin he hopes it will be sooner rather than later._

_He doesn't think about his old life, he resolutely turned his eyes from it and he isn't going to make the mistake of turning back. Sodom and Gomorrah. And in this case he would be the pillar of salt. He hasn't entirely let go of his teachings. _

_But Dean sneaks in. Or rather, Dean never really left and occasionally moves under his skin, prompting a dream or a sudden pang of memory. For the most part he pulls away from such memories as he would from a white hot object clumsily pressed into his palm. _

_The dreams are however, undeniable, as they always were._

_He gets up, tosses the saturated underwear into the hamper and makes his way to the tiny bathroom to wash. On his way back to bed, clean and wearing unsullied underwear, he stops by the refrigerator to pour out a glass of water. The fridge is mostly empty, save for the jug of water, a bottle of milk and a saran wrapped plate of pasta with parmesan and basil. He holds the cold glass in his hand, staring into his fridge at one in the morning, the room dark save for the white light of the open door. _

_He'd made that with Dean. That exact recipe, from one of his books, still lying open on the counter._

_He can't believe he'd forgotten that._

_Uneasily, and with a sense that he is being both ridiculous and pitiful, he picks up the plate, walks slowly to the bin, and drops the entire lot of pasta, and plate, into the trash. After a moment's hesitation he picks up the recipe book and does the same. Setting down his glass of water he ties up the trash bag and takes it outside to the dumpster, then comes back and lines the bin with a fresh bag, so that in the morning there's a chance he won't remember this happening._

_He curls up in his bed again, still smelling crushed basil and trying to get to sleep. Montag leaps up beside his head._

"_Montag, out." He shoves at it's warm body but it coils closer, purring. _

_A thought strikes him and makes him laugh without knowing why._

_Montag. _

_He'd named the cat after Guy Montag, three years ago...and he'd only just realised._


	19. Chapter 19

_Ruby accosts him the next day. It's not the ideal moment, because thanks to his subconscious he's lost a lot of sleep to thoughts of Dean, too much sleep in fact, to be of much use at work. _

_He hadn't been able to help it, first the dream, then the meal, and the realisation that he'd named his cat after a figure from the last book they'd read together...it had affected him greatly. So much so that he'd mentally trawled his possessions as he lay in bed, wondering what else had slipped by his notice, what other parts of Dean had he clung onto and insinuated into his life?_

_He was still pondering it as he attempted to make instant coffee in the break room. So far his list amounted to- the classic rock station he had tuned his radio to, the episodes of E.R. he watches blearily in the evenings (reminding him as they do of Dean's terrible taste in medi-dramas), a stack of Stephen King novels which he now realises he bought because he thought they'd interest Dean, and the box of pop tarts in his cupboard, which reminds him of the first meal Dean made for him. _

_Though he likes the rock music, television shows and books themselves, he can see how they are rooted in Dean. Therefore, they have to be disposed of, for his own sanity._

"_Thinking pretty deep there Cas, it's just coffee." Ruby chides from the doorway, dark velvet tunic barely encompassing the fullness of her chest. He ducks his head over the mug, adding creamer and stirring vigorously in the hopes that she will leave quickly. _

"_If I didn't know better I'd say you'd been avoiding me all week." She murmurs instead, prowling closer and laying a hand on his shoulder. "Did you miss me Cassy? All alone in the back of the stacks?" Her voice is breathy and she smells of strawberry gum and cigarettes. _

"_I've been busy with periodicals." He says offhandedly, trying to ignore how close she's gotten. "How have been?"_

"_Oh, bored, sooo bored without you. Chuck just doesn't cut it...conversationally." She smiles, wet pink lips spread wide over her white teeth. "we should catch up."_

"_That would be nice." Castiel mutters noncommittally as he reaches for the sugar. "But I actually have to get back..."_

"_I was thinking...dinner?" Ruby cuts in smoothly. "Maybe my place? I do a great eggplant parmesan..."_

"_That would be nice." Castiel smiles, mentally working out what to say to alleviate the unwanted tension. "I don't have many friends here."_

"_Well...I was planning on being more than friendly." She rubs her fingers into his shoulder. _

"_Ruby...I'm actually...I'm flattered but I..." He falters._

"_Is it the priest thing? Because Chuck told me about that and...well, I can be...delicate." she purrs. _

"_I'm actually still celibate." Castiel moves back, hands folded apologetically. "It's more of a...choice now, but I intend to hold to it."_

"_And I can't persuade you otherwise...Father?" she presses closer and his old title used in such a way, redolent with desire, reminds him strongly of Dean. _

"_No. I'm..." he sighs, "Ruby I'm sure you can get any man you want, and they would be lucky to have you...but I don't date women, and I've never entertained the idea of doing so, even since I left the priesthood."_

_Her sloe dark eyes cross his face carefully as she turns his words over._

"_Are you...you said 'women'..." She says slowly. _

_Castiel bristles minutely._

"_Ruby."_

"_Women, like...you've never, been interested? Ever?..."_

_He can't speak, can't derail this._

"_Castiel, are you gay?" _

_He freezes._

"_You're gay?" Ruby says loudly, incredulously as he face pinches with disgust. "But you were a...oh my God, is that why you're here? Did they kick you out?" _

"_I left of my own volition." He says stiffly. _

"_Good...good, because...people like you? Shouldn't be in that kind of position...not when people are counting on you to be moral and...normal." she backs away uncertainly and opens the break room door. "You're not who I thought you were." She leaves and Castiel is left with his cooling coffee and sick feeling of having been found out, even though his worst defects are still hidden. _

_What would Ruby think if she knew about Dean? Seventeen year old, confused Dean?_

_Castiel cradles his coffee in one hand, fumbling the change in his pocket with the other, he has time to call Gabriel from the office pay phone and schedule a private meeting that evening. Three years is a long time to hold back a sin in confession. But no longer. _

Dean meets Michael on the street outside his dorm, they've got the weekend off and he's using it to follow Michael home for some religious therapy. It's at a church he hasn't been to before, but it's in Michael's home town and apparently he knows the priest there pretty well.

"You'll like him, he, well he really helped me when I was figuring this out, and he's a lot more open to alternatives than other priests." Michael enthuses as Dean drives them through the unfamiliar town. He's only half listening, mainly because he can't imagine the kind of priest who'd support sodomy in a kid barely out of high school. Not when Castiel had felt as he did and still maintained that it was wrong.

"It took me a long time to come to terms with it myself, let along tell my parents." Michael continues. "But Father Milton was there the whole time, he's really understanding."

"I'm sure he is." Dean mutters, hands still chocking the life from the steering wheel. Michael notices his stiff posture.

"I'm talking too much, aren't I?" He sighs. "Sorry."

"No, it's...it's just I haven't been to church for a while...I kind of lapsed a little."

"I know." Michael says softly. "I just don't get why...you're the most religious guy I know, you're like, scarily devoted, and I see what it does to you." He shakes his head. "Dean you've been...closed off and then suddenly all over me like you can't stand to think about it, you disappeared for days after the first time I touched you...there." He finishes awkwardly. "And then, when we were moving into going all the way...was it something I did? Or that I was doing wrong the whole time...?"

"No." Dean says shortly. "No, Mike it wasn't you."

"So...what happened to you?" Michael presses. "I get that you're Catholic, hey, me too. But you're...I don't want to say 'unstable' but I never knew how you were going to react, one minute you were into it, next you were...destroyed."

"You want to have this conversation now?"

"I wanted to have it a while ago...there just never seemed a good time to ask." Michael murmurs. "And you don't have to tell me, but You might want to talk to Gabriel about it."

"You call your priest by his first name?" Dean smirks, barely breaking the tension.

"I told you, he's great." Michael points through the window. "That's the back entrance to the lot, church is just around the corner."

"Ok." Dean steers through the gates. "Let's do this."


	20. Chapter 20

_He'd avoided Ruby all day, skulking like a criminal through the back aisles of the library in the hopes of avoiding anyone she might have told about him, which by now meant most of the staff and even casual visitors to the library. It was a small town and in the last three years he had been one of only two new arrivals to the place. Gossip travelled fast and this was groundbreaking, perversion and morality warring in one of the most potent scandals the place had ever experienced._

_Castiel had grown more nervous and more paranoid with every hour, until finally he'd been a wreck of self loathing and humiliation, greater even than the week proceeding his flight from his last home, and from Dean._

_Thankfully, Father Milton is already in the church when he gets there after work. Castiel walks slowly through the pews and greets him calmly, but his heart is hammering._

"_Castiel, you sounded terrible on the phone...what happened?" Gabriel holds his shoulders and looks him in the eye._

"_I need to confess." He can't get the dead tone out of his voice._

_Gabriel sighs. _

"_Castiel, we've been doing this for three years, if you can't bring yourself to tell me the full extent of..."_

"_I can." Castiel takes a deep breath. "I...I haven't told you that, before I came here, I sinned. I gave myself over to my...sickness, and with a boy from my parish." He throws the words out, feeling them trip over each other in their rush; he can't wait for the confessional booth, which reminds him so much of everything he betrayed. He can't stop the words from coming out, finally, now they have the chance. "He was struggling with this, with feeling like this and I...I wanted him so much, and he wanted me, more than any other boy or...he just wanted me, so I..." He shakes his head as the flow of words dries up._

"_How old was he?" Gabriel asks, his voice keenly level, but his eyes betraying his distress. "Castiel tell me the boy's age."_

"_He was seventeen." _

_Gabriel visibly relaxes. _

"_And you had intercourse with him?" he asks gently. _

_Castiel nods shamefacedly. "I let him...I..." The words choke him and he can't find ways to express how it was Dean who took him, but that it was he who was at fault in this. Never Dean. _

_Gabriel wraps his arms around his shoulders, and holds him as Castiel shakes and struggles with himself._

"_Oh Castiel..."_

_Tears well up and burn down his face, and he finds that the priest's woe and speechlessness hurts him more than recriminations and disgust. He cannot bear to be this thing, pitied and reviled in equal measure, he cannot stand to be allowed even this small reprieve. He is a monster, and three years of denial and secrecy have only protected him from the world's eyes. _

"_Castiel." Gabriel steps away from him and guides him to a hard wooden pew to sit, sliding in beside him. "Tell me how it started." He says gently. _

_Castiel breathes carefully, controlling himself until he can be sure the words will come out without a sob, that they will come out at all. _

"_He confessed to me." He folds his fingers over his knees. "I offered him help, but he told me that...he confessed a desire for me, and I should have turned him away, towards someone else...but I didn't." He exhales shakily. "He said it had to be me, that he needed me...I so wanted to be needed, and I thought I was strong enough not to think of him, like that."_

_Gabriel waits patiently. _

"_We began to meet outside of service, in my office. I told him my own methods for controlling the impulse, and it seemed to work for him..."_

"_What happened then?" Gabriel asks softly. _

"_I had an accident." Castiel murmurs, tonelessly. "I used to take ice baths to stop myself from...well, to stave off desire, and he had been having such an effect on my that I'd stopped eating...trying to make myself spiritually strong. But I lost consciousness in the bath...I think I might have drowned if he had not sought me out...he saved me." A small smile curves Castiel's lips, almost instantly quashed. "He tried to take care of me." He mutters thoughtfully._

"_Did he?"_

_Castiel nods. "He brought me food and he made sure I took care of myself. After a while he started to show me his music, films I'd missed growing up the way I did...I used to read to him."_

"_And how long did this go on for?" Gabriel asks, wondering how and why Castiel managed to sustain such a relationship._

"_Months...I found him to be good company...I enjoyed his presence more than I should...and when he asked me if he could stay with me...sleep in my bed that night, I said yes." His voice has gone very quiet. "He slept next to me and nothing happened, we were so careful."_

"_When did you become physical with him, Castiel"? Gabriel asks gently._

"_He told me he trusted me...that we could share the same space without worrying that one of us would slip." His brow furrows. "He undressed for me."_

_Gabriel watches the other man struggle with the memory that clearly brings him incredible happiness, and the knowledge that it had ruined him thereafter. _

"_He was so careful with me." Castiel practically whispers, seemingly unaware or uncaring of Gabriel's presence, his office and station, he has never spoken of this out loud before and his chest is painfully tight, like he will never be able to get it all out, this feeling, these memories, as if there aren't enough words for the suffering and joy of it._

"_So gentle and...and I let him be with me...I'd never been with anyone." His fingers clench and he shakes his head. "I wanted him so much...and it was my fault, my fault that I let him in, I let him take me and then...and then he was a sinner, just like me."_

_The next thing he becomes aware of, in the swimming cold nausea that fills him in the wake of his confession, is the weight of Gabriel's arm around his shoulders. _

"_He forgives you, you know."_

_Castiel closes his eyes. _

"_God forgives you, if you need it. If you deserve it...and you never meant to hurt him."_

_Castiel shakes his head._

"_It's forgiven. Now let it go." Gabriel insists gently. "You can let it go."_

Michael shows Dean into the atrium of the church, they stop at the stoup and Dean dips his fingers into the water, making the sign of the cross like he's never been away. The building is so still and silent, like the outside world has stopped and calmed for this place.

It's been an age since he was in a place like this, and yet he cannot be calm in a place like this, a place so redolent of incense and smoky fabric and Castiel. It reminds him of Sunday Masses spent watching him lead the hall in prayer, unbearably tight and wound with longing as he watched Castiel's mouth move with the words, pale fingers tapping the edge of the lectern.

"You ok?" Michael taps him on the shoulder and Dean realises he's been frozen, looking at the icon above the small vessel of holy water.

"Yeah, fine...so where's this priest of yours?"

"Somewhere around...I'll go check his office." Michael smiles slightly. "I'll be back in a second."

"Not going anywhere." Dean mutters more to himself than Michael's back.

He sighs and looks up at the carved ceiling, eyes following the ridges of the wood down to the stone supports, shaped like faces looking down. He's closes his eyes, trying to martial together a prayer.

"Please God...just make it stop. Let it be over." Is all he can manage, all he can think of. He needs to forget, to let go and to be able to do what Castiel wanted – marry a woman and live his life the way he was supposed to.

_Gabriel hears the doors of the atrium open, footsteps as two men appear in the shadow of the main door. He'd forgotten his meeting with Michael, and his friend in definite need of help. He squeezes the shoulder of the man next to him, still shaking with overwrought emotion._

"_Castiel...I have a visitor to speak with."_

"_Forgive me for overstaying...I'll go." Castiel straightens weakly. "Thank you Father..."_

"_Actually, it might benefit you to stay, the two of you appear to be suffering in much the same way, perhaps meeting will help you to progress..." he sighs. "also...you taught this boy, the one from your old parish, a very harsh doctrine, one which has tortured you, and probably him for quite some time – think of this as a way to make it right. You can help me to end someone's suffering." _

_Castiel seems to think on it, mind filling with all the ways in which this conflicts with what he has always believed to be true. But perhaps, perhaps he can grow to accept this part of himself, to realise that it is not a perversion, and maybe that will help him to control it, to hold it back from the surface by embracing it, not fighting it. _

_He nods. "I believe that would be the right thing to do." _

_Gabriel stands, gesturing towards the front of the church. "Excellent, then I will find Michael and his guest and we can talk."_

_Castiel stands and walks meekly at the priest's side as they cross the cool floor of the church. A blond boy meets them halfway, cutting through the pews as he approaches from the vestry. _

"_Father!" he shakes Gabriel's hand and grins at him before turning uncertainly to Castiel. "I'm sorry, did I...?"_

"_This is Castiel, he'll be joining us this evening." Gabriel says firmly, but warmly. Michael smiles at Castiel then, bright and untroubled._

"_Great, it might make things easier if it's not just me, Dean's kind of...uncomfortable with me right now."_

_He hears the name and the world goes still. Surely it cannot happen like this, not now, not _here _of all places._

_Gabriel realises that Castiel is no longer walking with him, and turns to look at him. _

"_Castiel? What's wrong." _

_Castiel shakes his head dumbly, frozen to the spot. _

_Gabriel raises a hand to touch his arm, but Castiel backs away like a spooked deer._

_The voice is quiet, but Gabriel still turns towards it, seeing clearly for the first time, the boy standing by the door._

"_Cas...?"_


	21. Chapter 21

_Dean has grown. _

_Through the paralysing fear and joy and awfulness of the moment, that's the first thing he notices. Dean, now nearly twenty-one by his reckoning, has filled out since his late teens, the last time Castiel had seen him. Now he's over a foot taller, wider in the shoulders and thicker in his limbs. Stronger, larger and yet still so similar to the sad, sunken eyed teenager who'd come to him on his final day at home._

"_Dean." It's an acknowledgement, a greeting, an apology for being here._

_In the resounding silence he could swear he hears his breath catch._

_They're all frozen in place, Gabriel and his parishioner between himself and the man Dean has become. He can see Gabriel fitting it together, watching the tumblers fall into place as their secret is unlocked and broken open. The stranger, the boy who must be Dean's...friend? lover? What has the intervening time made of him? Looks between them, frowning, slower than Gabriel, not knowing Castiel's side of it – but guessing all the same. _

"_Dean?" he turns to his friend, the first to move. Wanting an explanation, a denial of something he does not yet fully comprehend. _

_Dean shakes his head, still staring right at him, eyes linking across the space between and refusing to let go. Castiel can't quantify the needs in him, he wants to run, towards and away from Dean, to touch him, to hold him, to strike him, to walk away from him and never think of him again, to take him back to his own tiny apartment, wrap him in his own quilt and never leave his side._

_He wants Dean. The words that go in between those three simple ones change from minute to minute, second to second. But he wants, always._

"_Castiel...what would you like to do?" Gabriel asks, quietly. _

_Castiel looks at him without any idea what he wants, and Gabriel reads it in his eyes._

"_I meant what I said, you can make this right." Gabriel touches his shoulder gently. "If you'd like me to give you two some privacy..."_

"_Wait." The blond boy holds up a hand, barring their way, and Dean is still frozen mere paces away down the aisle, like the groom in a demented wedding ceremony. "What's going on?" He turns to Gabriel. "Father?" _

"_Michael...I think this is something they need to discuss in private." Gabriel says gently. "Perhaps you and I should let them speak."_

_Michael rounds on Dean. _

"_Dean? Who is this?" he asks, and Dean looks so pained, caught out and shocked from himself, that Castiel can barely stand the rising of the defensive impulse within him. _

"_Dean." Michael demands._

He can't answer, all this words are drying at the back of his throat. He'd recognised Castiel as he'd drawn closes, but now that he can see him clearly it's like a vice has clenched in his chest, he can't move, can't speak. Because it's Castiel. Castiel who he hurt, and lost and pined for.

Castiel who he was never going to see again. Standing right in front of him.

He doesn't know what to do, what Castiel wants him to do. Does he want Dean to go? To stay or to run or to lie for him? Once again he is seventeen, young and stupid and in need of guidance from the older man, directions on how they should proceed.

And there's Michael, demanding answers he cannot give without endangering Castiel, without smearing his own name.

And it's in that confusion that he finds the one word he needs.

"Castiel?" It comes out as a question, begging for help, for a sign as to what they should do to extricate themselves from this tangled mess.

The older man turns towards the stranger, the priest.

"Take him to my office." Gabriel says gently, and pushes Castiel slightly towards where Dean is waiting. Castiel walks towards him and each footfall is painful with suspense, what should he do when he reaches him? When they get to the office and are alone?

He walks stiffly beside Castiel as he crosses the church towards the priest's office, eyes on the flagged floor, shoe scuffs loud in the loaded silence. He's so close he could take his hand if he wanted, touch Castiel's arm, his face and neck. He doesn't, and the compulsion nearly breaks him there. Three years of being too far to touch, and now he can see what he has missed and he needs it back more than ever.

Castiel holds the door for Dean and then closes it behind them, shutting out the cavernous church and enclosing them in silence, in privacy. They stand awkwardly, facing each other, and Dean notices the small lines that crinkle the corners of Castiel's eyes, and the edges of his mouth. He's only thirty three, but the few years they've been apart have still wrought change in him.

Dean swallows the wave of misery that creates in him.

"I don't know what to say." Castiel says softly. His voice cracking a little and betraying him.

"Me neither." Dean fiddles with his cuffs, fingers rubbing the fabric. "I didn't think I'd see you again."

"Well, I didn't plan on this." Castiel murmurs sadly. "I didn't know that...that any of this would happen." He shakes his head. "I never planned _you."_

Dean looks up at him then and reads the tension in Castiel's frame. He hates it, that they are strangers now, who have wronged each other and left each other, forced together by coincidence.

That he can't help.

"Can I..." he stops, fingers clenching and unclenching nervously.

"What?" The older man murmurs.

Castiel's breath is knocked from him as Dean grasps him tightly, arms going around him as they had many times before, finding the places where they once rested so easily, now with the bulk and strength of age to shelter the smaller man within. Castiel stiffens, his entire body jerking at the unexpected assault, then he grasps Dean back and sobs a quiet sigh against his throat, where his face is buried. Dean inhales the scent of his skin, unchanged from their last day together.

"I missed you." He manages, adolescent anguish and the gut wrenching gear change of the evening finally catching up to him. Castiel just nods fervently against his collar bone, unable to answer in any other way. Dean knots his fingers in Castiel's hair and strokes, alternately pulling and soothing as he had once done, book in one hand and the other man's head in his lap.

"I don't even..." Dean stops trying to speak, blocks out the knowledge that he will have to release Castiel and watch him leave for a second time, the knowledge that everything and yet nothing, has changed since that first day of separation.

He holds onto him and lets Castiel's tears soak his shirt collar, clinging to the smaller man and wishing he was young enough to believe that Castiel could protect him from the pain he knows is coming.


	22. Chapter 22

_The updates are coming! The updates are coming! has been down for me for a while and has prevented me from updating, so I am writing in the hopes that it will come back online soon so that I can post this._

_Ultimate thanks to Kiratoya for telling me how to find the loophole in the FF-fail. _

Castiel pulls away enough to cup Dean's face carefully, smiling with an edge of sadness.

"You've grown."

"Not much." Dean rubs against the warm palm pressed to his cheek.

"You're taller than me now." Castiel murmurs, and Dean can feel his breath on his face, feel the tightening in his stomach that heralds both nerves and misery and need. Castiel senses the slight movement as Dean leans forward, and he pushes him away a little, holding him at a distance.

"Don't tell me I can't." Dean murmurs fiercely.

"We shouldn't..." Castiel's every movement is regretful, as he begins to move away, eyes downcast protectively.

Dean presses their mouths together, hesitantly at first, bottom lip catching underneath Castiel's as he draws it gently into his mouth. But when Castiel doesn't reject the sudden kiss he deepens it, pulling away a little to brush their lips gently together, tongue touching between Castiel's tentatively, his stomach set with tension. He tastes the way he remembers, only more so, and Dean closes his eyes to the tortured moments of this half remembered sensation, feeling it in the present.

Castiel parts his lips with a small sound, pleading and lost, feeling Dean's hands brushing his face, holding him firm as his own hands drop to Dean's waist. For a long moment all Dean can feel is the soaring of his stomach, the soft touch of Castiel's lips on his and the hesitant brush of their tongues, never quite meeting for more than a second. They both revel in the half forgotten details of this, the way the other tastes and smells and feels beneath their lips.

Castiel nuzzles his nose against Dean's, lips parting to murmur. "Michael..."

"He's no one...no one I promise..." Dean pulls him back into the kiss with the desperate need t make it true, to erase Michael from his history and have only this, then and now.

Castiel lets him.

A soft cough breaks them apart, Castiel looks down, hands moving quickly from Dean's waist to wring each other in front of him. Dean wets his lips nervously, looking up as Father Gabriel closes the door.

"I gather you'd like some time alone...but I think this has gone on quite long enough." Gabriel says gently, rounding the desk and gesturing that they should take a seat.

Castiel sits slowly. "Father, I apologise...I know better than to allow this to happen...here of all places." He looks at Dean, taking the sight of his bowed head as the other man tries to make his bold frame inconspicuous. He rests his fingers lightly on the arm of Dean's chair. "Three years is just, a very long time." He whispers, and when Dean looks at him, happiness and hope evident in his features, Castiel feels his heart thump lazily, remembering all the nights they'd been so close, wishing that they could have that time again, when that is impossible.

"Castiel, I have no intention of punishing you, you are already quite adept at that." Gabriel says softly. "But I feel that you have done Dean a great disservice...you've damaged him, although quite unintentionally. I believe you truly did mean to save him...but it seems you have failed."

Castiel feels the dread of hell, never far from him, well up in his chest. Dean shakes his head disbelievingly.

"He did. He did save me." He insists. "Castiel tell him...you...you left!" his voice cracks "You said it could never happen again, that we...that we couldn't be together because of what it meant for us...He saved me." He glowers at Gabriel. "Don't you dare say he didn't."

"Dean." Castiel admonishes gently. "I was at fault with you..."

"Don't" Dean snaps. "Just...I wasn't a kid, I knew exactly what I wanted and I wasn't strong enough to stop myself from taking it..." he turns desperately to Gabriel. "It wasn't his fault, Father please don't..."

"Calm yourself." Gabriel advises. "What I mean is that..." he sighs. "Not all priests feel as Castiel does, that homosexuality is a passport to damnation. I think that Castiel's upbringing, one of the strictest I've heard of, may have...warped his perception of our faith...I understand how that must make this very difficult for you." He reaches a hand to where Castiel's is resting on the desk, only to have the other man draw it back a little, disbelievingly.

"Do not tell me it is all my invention." Castiel murmurs stonily. "It is God's word Father, how can you..."

"It is God's word, filtered through prophets and translation and additions and subtractions by the clergy of a hundred different times and places, none of whom were infallible." Gabriel insists. "Yes, there are books that seem to forbids this...relationship that you two have developed, but so much of what is preached comes from love and the devotion to God that we strive for...to obsess so blindly over this one flaw is a sin in itself."

Dean shakes his head mutely and Gabriel turns to him.

"Castiel has wronged you, only in that he tried to save you with this...doctrine, so firmly instilled in him. I do not doubt that his motives were good but to criminalise your every thought as he has his own, since adolescence? It is not healthy, and it is not what God would want, not the God that I believe in anyway."

"Don't tell me that it's right." Dean grits out. "What do you know about it? How it feels to want...to need so much and know that it is...evil ?" He sucks in a harsh breath. "You don't know! You don't know what it is that God wants for us, and you want us to damn ourselves on a...rose tinted theory of God's love?"

Gabriel looks at him, long and hard, until Dean's sudden anguish has burnt itself into shame and silence.

"Do you know what sin is, Dean?" He asks finally.

"An act against God." Dean answers immediately. "Wilful disobedience."

"And you would agree Castiel?"

Castiel nods grimly.

"The concept of the seven deadly sins...is that they are the extremes of human behaviour, that divert you from God." Gabriel says slowly. "Sloth is shirking your righteous duties, Greed is valuing possessions above God's love...and Lust is the pursuit of gratification over that love – it's a distraction from your true purpose, a folly...and it is also not what you have committed." He tucks his hands together on the surface of the desk and marshals his thoughts, here he is arguing for the happiness, the sanity of two wounded men, he knows how important what he says will be. "You remained devoted to God, even as you found and loved each other...and as far as I can see, Dean, in surrendering Castiel you have begun to doubt God...you have turned your back on him."

Dean wraps his arms around himself and refuses to meet Castiel's eye as the man turns to him.

"And Castiel..." Gabriel continues. "You believe that God has abandoned you, that he no longer loves you because of what you have done."

"Could you?" Castiel asks. "Could you believe that God loves you, after the sins I've willingly committed?"

Gabriel watches his friends face twist in pain.

"He loves you, as he loves all things." He says gently. "I don't believe, many people, don't believe, that God cares who, or how we love...as long as we love him, and as long as we are pure in our love for each other, not ridden by lust...then he cannot find our emotions objectionable...or our choices blasphemous."

When Gabriel stops speaking there is only silence for endless seconds.

"That's not true." Dean says after a while. "It can't be..."

"Why?" Gabriel challenges, simply.

"Because..." Dean shakes his head, shoulders shaking with suppressed shudders of misery. "If it is...I've wasted so much time...I've wasted us..." he touches Castiel's hand blindly. "On nothing...on a lie."

Castiel grips his fingers back and closes his eyes against the tears that are gathering. All his life he has followed what he believed to be the right path. Hard as it was, painful as it became, almost unbearable...it had been the right thing to do.

And now he was forgiven the sins that existed only to him...now he knew that he had never been wrong, sick, evil...but he had left Dean for nothing, three years of loneliness and torment over the wrong he had done him...the wrong folly to hate himself for – when he should have damned his pride for making him believe that he had followed a righteous path all his life, and that it was this path, and only this path, that could save Dean from sin.

He had failed Dean, not by wanting him and taking pleasure in him.

But by making him a copy of himself, and instilling him with tenets and values like shards of glass, to turn and slice and torture at the slightest movement, as they tormented him.

"I think both of you need to talk about this...I cannot begin to know of your relationship, but the feeling behind it? Is not a sickness as far as I can see...if you reason even after this that you should part again...well then that will be your decision, but you cannot make such a decision based on fear of Hell and confliction desire. So think on it." Gabriel sighs. "You may also need to address Michael on the matter...I know that you two are friends, and I believe he is concerned for you given Castiel's presence here, which I felt it was not my place to explain...also..." Gabriel seems uncomfortable. "Given Castiel's age...which is considerably more than your own, Dean...you may need to think seriously as to whether to continue this relationship...and if you do...how you will present it to the world at large."

Dean nods, still lost in the revelations the priest had brought, still clutching Castiel's hand like a life line and feeling the lasting pressure of his lips on his own from less than an hour before.

"Thank you Father." He manages.

"Thank you Gabriel." Castiel echoes. Soft fingers warm in the grip of Dean's palm.


	23. Chapter 23

They leave Gabriel's office together, but separate, no longer touching as they find themselves back in the main body of the church. Michael is sitting in a pew close by, eyes closed and face bowed as if in prayer. Castiel pauses nervously when he sees him, and Dean bumps their hands together gently, feeling even that slight contact catches at his heart and makes it ache.

Castiel threads their fingers together uncertainly, looking at them with a kind of fierce concentration that came from conflict and the urge to run from it.

"Don't leave me." Dean murmurs in the stillness of the church, gripping Castiel's hand as he half orders, half begs him to stay. Castiel bows his head and leans slowly closer to him, resting his forehead against Dean's shoulder. Dean strokes a hand down Castiel's back.

"Never." Castiel promises, and the ache in Dean's chest grows to a roar of protective need and possessive gratitude for that one word.

Fragile as they are, they are here. Together. Whatever it takes to preserve that, to work it out, he will do it without question.

Michael opens his eyes, and even in the gloom of the church, with Castiel's soft dark hair obscuring part of his vision, Dean can see the confusion and pain in his friends eyes. Michael, almost his lover and now just a friend who wanted to him to be happy, looks somehow curious and appalled, unable to understand the two men before him, the way in which Dean clings to Castiel like a rock in a storm.

"Dean..." Michael stands and takes a step forwards before pausing as Castiel moves away from Dean to look at the source of the sound. "Dean...tell me what's happening here." He asks quietly.

"Michael...this is Castiel." He touches Castiel's arm softly. "He's...he's the reason for all this..." he gestures meaninglessly around them. "He's...my first...I mean the only...the only person I've been with..." he winces because in many ways he has been with Michael also, but that is different and he cannot pretend that it wasn't. "I've been in love with him since I was seventeen." He swallows. "I'm sorry...I couldn't tell you, it was supposed to be a secret and I couldn't..." he looks at Castiel, lost for words.

"Dean did me a great favour by keeping my secret." Castiel says quietly. "I don't know what would have happened to me otherwise."

"You'd be in jail." Michael says, voice blank of empathy. "You should be." He adds.

"Michael..." Dean steps towards him. Michael waves him off.

"Seventeen? You were seventeen and you!" he turns on Castiel. "You were what? Thirty? Thirty five?" He shakes his head in disgust. "How could you? He was a kid..." he looks at Dean. "You're still a kid compared to him, and he..." He clenches his fists. "He touched you? You two..." he rounds on Castiel again, "Did you fuck Sam too? Make it a big family secret?"

Dean strikes him and Michael is thrown back against the pew, nose dripping blood over his shirt. Castiel seizes his arm.

"Dean!" he pulls him back from Michael and cradles an arm around his waist in restraint, his breath tickling Dean's ear as he whispers urgently. "Let it go." Dean remains tense, everything urging him to fall on Michael and beat him.

"Dean...please."

He relaxes into Castiel's hold, feeling the man guide him back a little before Castiel ducks over Michael and extends a hand to pull him to his feet. Michael struggles up, swiping Castiel's hand away with disgust.

"Don't." He practically snarls. "Don't, touch me...whatever you did to Dean...was fucked, you are..." he shakes his head, hand going to his bloodied nose as he backs towards the doors. "You're fucked. It doesn't matter how you made Dean believe this...this fantasy, you're damned for this. For. Touching. A. Fucking. Kid." He hisses.

"Do. Not. Curse. In. My. Church. Michael." Gabriel bites out from behind them, and Dean half turns to look and the small man, back stiff with anger. "And do not presume to judge those who you brought here for my help."

"I didn't bring him." Michael snarls. "How can you defend this? This poisonous...he was a child, Father, how can you condone his actions?"

"I do not condone what you speak of...but I recognise it when I see it, as you clearly do not." Gabriel lowers his eyes sadly. "Michael, I think you should leave and gain control of yourself...give yourself time to get over the shock of it."

Michael looks at them, face pinched and irate, before storming out of the church.

Dean turns to Castiel.

"It's not true...you know that, please don't..."

Castiel touches his face, fingers tracing Dean's cheekbone.

"I know." Castiel looks surprised by his own words. "I know it's not."

He kisses him and Dean laces a hand into Castiel's hair, holding him close. Gabriel blinks at the suddenness of it and turns to go back to his office, feeling a need to give them privacy.

Dean breaks from Castiel's mouth and brushes his hand down the other man's throat.

"Let me stay with you tonight."

Castiel's eyes widen almost imperceptibly.

Dean raises his hands.

"Nothing like..." he sighs. "I was just, supposed to stay with Michael and...ok so that's not happening...and I'd like to stay with you." He cups his hands to the swell of Castiel's hips and feels the hipbones he remembers press in to his thumbs. "I always wanted to stay with you."

Castiel draws him into his arms again, and Dean takes his silent embrace as a 'yes'.


	24. Chapter 24

_BTW – being a brit – Savlon is slightly antiseptic cream and I have no idea if they have it in other countries. Just go with it. _

He drives the impala to Castiel's apartment in silence, Castiel sitting in the passenger seat where Michael had been only hours before. Dean's a little blown away by the idea that this is Castiel, Castiel in the front seat of his car, his one and only prized possession.

When he last saw Cas he hadn't been allowed to drive, let alone own a car.

Castiel turns to him at a red light, arms folded in his lap.

"This is weird isn't it?" He says.

"Kinda" Dean admits. "Seems like twenty minutes ago I was a kid, and now I'm not...and you're a regular person with an apartment and a job...and I have a car and an assignment to do tomorrow..."

"Almost like we're normal?" Castiel smiles slightly.

"Yeah...what's up with that?" Dean smirks, feeling some of the awkwardness evaporate.

"It does seem a little...strange." Castiel frowns at the windshield. "To be allowed to do this, to have this time...hours ago I wouldn't have thought it possible...I wouldn't have dared hope for it."

Dean pulls away again as the lights change, driving down main street towards Castiel's apartment.

"I know what you mean." He taps the steering wheel contemplatively. "When Michael told me to come here...I figured it'd be some circle of trust crap, lots of people telling me it's 'ok to be gay'...this is...beyond better." He shakes his head. "I can't believe you're really here."

"Me either." Castiel smiles shyly, head lowered, and Dean remembers that smile, the way Castiel half laughed over something he'd said once about the picture of Atwood on the back cover of one of her books.

Dean pulls up at another set of lights.

"Seriously, what's with all the traffic control? I am one car." He grumbles.

"It's a safe neighbourhood." Castiel says with another slight smile. "They just..."

Dean catches the side of his face, turning him towards him and kissing him. It's beyond a light brush of reacquainted lips, deepening with a slide of Dean's tongue and a quiet groan from the man seated beside him. Castiel's hand pulls at Dean's hair urgently, sliding down to his neck and pulling him closer. Their lips part with tacky moisture and Dean feels Castiel's quiet 'Oh' as an exhalation against his mouth.

"Lights changed." Castiel's eyes rise slowly from Dean's parted lips.

Dean twists in his seat and hits the accelerator, finding the right lot for Castiel's building and starts prowling the aisles looking for a space. His hand strays to Castiel's knee, squeezing the firm flesh beneath the black fabric, rubbing the joint idly. Castiel's breath comes in a soft hitch, his fingers running from Dean's hand to his shoulder, index finger reaching to stroke his cheek.

"What are we doing...here?" He asks quietly.

"You live here." Dean tries for humour but fails miserably.

"Dean..." Castiel tips his head, face marred with uncertainty. "I...I don't know what we're doing."

Dean pulls into a space sharply and pulls the key out of the ignition. He reluctantly removes his hand from Castiel's body, reaching to removes Castiel's hand from his shoulder, holding it as he considers.

"I can wait...I mean...three years and all that stuff..." He shakes his head. "I'm still bad at this talk...but we don't have to do anything that...that we're not ready for...just because of what Gabriel said."

Castiel's hand sneaks out of Dean's grasp and draws him down into a kiss. Dean makes a surprised sound at the back of his throat, hands tentatively meeting Castiel's waist as the older man tilts his head and pushes up into the kiss, tugging Dean closer.

They kiss for a tense moment, Castiel's mouth opening against his, Dean's teeth catching Cas's lip and rolling the flesh between them. Castiel squirms back a little, pulling Dean with him, and the weight of Dean's post-adolescent form pushes him down on the seat, until they're almost lying down, Castiel's hand rubbing the small of Dean's back in circles that start off warm and start to burn long before he slides his hand under his shirt.

The sounds of creaking upholstery, rustling clothes, and desperate snatches of breath are amplified in the tiny space. When Castiel throws his head back, Dean's hands on his hips and a long, seizing gasp raking his throat, Dean looks up at him, thumbing the width of leather at the waistband of the older man's pants.

They lie like that, Dean resting on top of him, rubbing shyly and softly against each other, mouths touching in a rush of wet warmth and breath. Castiel whimpers, feeling desire on every nerve, plucking him raw and making him live, like a wire tuned to a storm.

It's wonderful.

That simple truth, that here, under Dean in the back of his car, sighing against his mouth, warm and smoothed out in the tensing and relaxing of Dean's body, is something he has never had. At thirty-three he's experienced physical intimacy only once, in a rush and with cataclysmic totality. This is deliciously pitched between a kiss and lying with Dean, naked, full. This is the midpoint for them, to be allowed to touch and feel as if there is no world, and yet still want, still need.

Being told he is allowed this, taught that it is no sin, is different to believing it.

But three years without Dean, the sudden laxness in his own iron resolve (corroded as it might have been) culminates in this, a tense session of groping and touching and feeling each other, connection welling from the old bond with them. Broken only when Dean sits up, hair mussed lips reddened and throat swallowing convulsively as he regains control of himself.

They slow, and Dean tugs Castiel upright, touching him softly and drawing him into his arms, murmuring against his hair.

"Are we going inside?" He catches the uncertain look in Castiel's eyes. "For dinner Cas...maybe some sleep..."

Castiel nods. Dean shunts the car door open and slides out. Castiel follows and they stand uncertainly beside the vehicle, skin prickling with residual heat in the night air.

Castiel takes Dean's hand and leads him towards his apartment.

Once inside it begins to feel as if no time has passed for them, and yet Castiel feels the knowledge that it has been three years in fact, cuts him periodically as he watches Dean unwrap and cook a frozen pizza. They settle into his couch and divide the food, Montag prowling around Dean's legs in search of titbits.

"You have a cat?" Dean chucks Montag under the chin, rubbing the cat's back and ears until Montag abandons any semblance of propriety and jumps up into his lap.

"Montag." He says, partly in explanation, partly as a rebuke. "He moved in when I did."

Dean chucks the animal under the chin.

"So...this is where the talk needs to happen." He sighs, trailing a hand over Montag's fur.

Castiel folds up on himself on his side of the couch, it's a new habit that he's picked up. One that Dean finds odd in such a mature man.

"I you wish it." He curls his long fingers around his ankles and thinks for a moment. "You and Michael were lovers." He says sadly, his heart cracking a little with it.

Dean nods.

"Why, after everything we...why would you touch someone else?" asks Castiel in a small voice.

"Because... it didn't matter...I thought maybe God wasn't really watching, that he didn't care..." Dean hunkers down in his seat, Montag escaping from his lap to nuzzle Castiel's hand. "I never wanted him as much as I wanted you...it wasn't worth...anything near what we had, and I could never...I was never with him, not the way we were." Dean shakes his head. "I wish I'd never let you leave." He murmurs. "I wish I'd never gone to college, I wish I'd never met Michael and that...that I'd spent these three years with you..."

"I don't know what I'd wish." Castiel says softly. "or how it would matter."

A terrible thing occurs to Dean, something that he'd lost somewhere in between Gabriel's intervention and Castiel's lips on his own.

"Cas...you're not...I mean, after tonight, I'll still see you, right? We can...we can have that now, you and me, together."

"And how would that work?" Castiel says sadly, insistently. "I'm sorry, for...I'm sorry that I kissed you before and touched...it was wrong to let that happen after so long and then to...Dean we can't be together, not then and not now."

Something new and tight in his chest dies suddenly at that.

"Cas...please..."

"No I...I wanted to see you, I want you to stay but...beyond tonight..." He shakes his head. "Can you imagine the pain this would cause you? Michael, Sam, your parents...they would all look on you as damaged and lost...and me as despicable and appalling...we could never be happy like that." He touches Dean's hand lightly. "I may have been wrong to criminalise this, to harrow both of us with it...but I will not now lose all my reasoning, I cannot see how we will bring anything but shame and hurt on our own heads."

Dean stares at him, welling with a kind of despair he hasn't felt since he was seventeen and watching Castiel drive away for good. For their own good. For good.

"We...we have tonight." He drags it from Castiel's tortured words like a life line.

"Dean...?" part question, part warning as Castiel looks into his face, mirroring its pain.

Dean ducks across the small space between them, hauling Castiel to him and bringing their mouths together, hard. Castiel pushes at his shoulders, knowing this is a bad idea, that they will wreck themselves and drown if they stir this up again. But the nudges of his palms against Dean's broad shoulders become weaker as Dean thrusts their tongues together and presses Castiel's hips down with his own. In the end the older man pulls him closer, mouth opening weakly to the surge of Dean's efforts, catching the wrenched whines and then the deeper groans he makes as they enfold each other.

It is nothing like what occurred in the car, not the relearning and sampling of each other that felt endless and yet pressed nothing forward on them. That wanted but did not take.

It is not the passive breaking of their first and only night of loving, where both of them were lost and allowing the walls to come down, for the struggle of holding them up.

This has force on both their sides, determined touches and sounds that are not covered by shamefully clenched teeth.

When Dean pulls Castiel to his feet and propels them both into the bedroom, they shed their clothes on the way, uncovering each other's skin and touching it, tasting it with the knowledge that they have a span of time now, and only now, to do so.

When they fall to the bed, Dean turns them and moves so that his hands are on Castiel's back, the older man with one knee falling between Dean's naked thighs, Castiel is surprised by their position, looking askance at Dean as he strokes his chest and feels the skin grow moist under his fingers, sweat already growing on them.

"I've waited...since I was sixteen." Dean murmurs, his voice thick. "I want you." His hands brush down the flat of Castiel's abdomen, reaching between his legs to stroke slowly at the warm, blood rich flesh there. Castiel stutters a rough sound and presses into the contact, leaning as Dean pulls him in, rubbing his crotch between the younger man's spread thighs.

"Cas..." Dean's breath hitches. He spreads wider, strong legs drawing up as his arms pull Castiel's slighter body down on top of him. "I want this...I want..."

Castiel kisses him, rubbing against the straining, stiff organ and feeling the softer parts of Dean beneath his body, hot and growing damp and slick in different places. There is nothing still about them, both moving restlessly, trying to bring themselves together, bodies working blindly as 'Dean' and 'Castiel' evaporate into sweat and damp exhalations.

Dean's hand catches at a tube of savlon on the nightstand, emptying some onto his own palm. He reaches between them and Castiel is thrown by how this action, Dean slowly rubbing and pushing himself open, can elicit such an affectionate response in him. It should be such a dirty thing, immodest and base, and yet the broken focus on Dean's face, his closed eyes and mouth, humming with pleased and frustrated sounds, lights him up with pleasure.

Nothing prepares him for the slow slide into Dean's body. He's felt the opposite side of this before, but still, the drawing, tight, heat of it. The slowly softening heated cream spreading between their joined flesh as Dean pushes up to him with a soft groan, tiny flickering clenches of desperation pulling him deeper, bringing pulses of fluid from him to coat the way further down where Dean is still hot and dry...

It's maddening and all consuming, and he loses his way, his mind for a few seconds, coming back to himself only to find his erection buried to the hilt in Dean's flesh, his head resting on the younger man's chest as his body shakes, Dean's hand stroking roughly at his sweat dampened hair. Dean's voice breaking as he pleases, "Cas...Cas _move...uh..._God _move..."_

The blasphemy does not halt him. He has set too much aside in God's name already, this one infraction he can surely forgive for the mountain of suffering he trades in at this moment.

He moves, drawing back past achingly resistant muscle and feeling cold air hit his cock before whimpering and pushing back inside, hearing the hitch in Dean's breath as he does so.

He moves and tries to keep his thighs from shaking, his back from trembling and he closes his eyes and feels Dean move with him. They find a rhythm almost by accident as Dean lifts his hips to Castiel's suddenly easy slide, a moan claws its way out of Castiel's throat and Dean leans up, hands grasping the other man's back and bringing them closer, one sweating palm fisting his own erection, bobbing near his stomach.

Through it all, each hot push into Dean and the backlash of pleasure up their spines, Dean stares into Castiel's eyes and he stares right back. Hands holding them both more or less upright, bodies working together, and mouths breathing close, almost touching.

Castiel comes with a low moan, pushing up just as Dean's legs give out and he falls down, impaling himself and feeling Castiel pulse there, eyes falling shut as he makes soft sounds of completion. His pale fingers touch Dean's cock, flushed scarlet and needy between them. That touch brings him to the edge with steel bright intensity.

They stop bobbing together, stop moving entirely, and Dean holds himself up after a second to let Castiel free himself.

They lie down on the bed, Castiel held in the curve of Dean's body.

Desolation chases away the warmth in the ex-priest and he closes his eyes. He has had all he will ever have, and he thanks God for that. Curses himself for leaving it so late, so long.

Dean's arm wraps his waist tightly.

"We're never going to see each other again...are we?" he says after a moment, and Castiel shakes his head as best he can. Dean kisses the back of his neck and he feels his body tighten with desire and misery at the feeling, post-coital bliss edging away and leaving him empty.

"No." Dean rolls him over and glares at him, alight with anger and flushed from sex. "Fuck...I'm twenty-one Cas...you don't get to tell me what to do."

"Dean..." he mutters uncertainly.

"No." He says again. "I'm not a kid anymore, so this? We decide together. And I know you want me to stay...you can't touch me like that and not want me to stay, I felt it." he touches Castiel's side possessively. "So I'll stay...and everyone else? Everything else will be as bad as it wants...I'm sick of second guessing everything, us, God, myself...you can't force this on me."

Castiel lies silently for a moment.

"Stay." He finds the miraculous word and uses it. "Stay with me."

Dean kisses his forehead as he himself used to do in the darkened hall of the church.

"Not even you, could make me leave." Dean murmurs.


	25. Chapter 25

Dean wakes up in the middle of the night, having never been a particularly restful sleeper, this isn't that odd. For a moment he doesn't know where he is, lying in a large bed that smells different to his own home and his college room. Warm and vaguely sticky under sheets that feel new and different. The light from between the slats of the blind at the window reveals a room stacked with books and the odd shadows cast from a potted plant on the top of a bookcase. Somewhere a cat mewls softly. Wind whimpers at the window.

He has no idea where he is.

Dean jerks upright, feeling his naked body brush against cotton as the sheets slide down. He looks around the darkened room and it takes him a second to notice the dark head of hair on the pillow beside him, the softly rising sheets where another body, slimmer than his own, is covered.

Castiel blinks up at him, newly awoken and looking more than a little dismayed by Dean's sudden movements and worried, almost panicked expression.

Dean remembers exactly whose bed he's in, where and why. He subsides back onto the mattress, lying closer to Castiel and laying an arm soothingly around his waist.

"Hey...it's ok." He rubs Castiel's side as the other man tenses guiltily. "I just got confused for a sec." He mutters, feeling Castiel's body so near his own, unable to prevent the slight twitch of interest that goes through him. Castiel shivers a little and presses closer. Dean strokes his hair.

"One day, we're going to sleep together and it won't put that look on your face...that, 'I did something wrong' look." Dean mumbles, feeling Castiel move closer, until his mouth trails across Dean's collar bone.

"One day." Castiel mutters, then lets out a soft groan as Dean shifts, rolling on top of him and pressing down lightly, touching and feeling his way in the dark. "It feels better now...a little better." Castiel sighs, Dean's hands tracing his ribs and hips in turn as his own hands grasp Dean's back, feeling his shoulder blades under his palms. They kiss shyly, softly in the dark, and Dean's breath hitches in a way that Castiel knows he will one day be able to call 'delicious'.

"So...uh..." Dean kisses him, quick and deliberate. "We're making up for lost time here?"

Castiel can't answer, not with Dean's hand gently brushing his groin, lifting his erection and sliding down on it with a gruff sound, still open from before and a little sore. Castiel presses his head back into the pillows, teeth sinking into his lower lip as a startled cry of pleasure escapes unhampered. Dean presses down with a whimper.

"We've never done this before." Dean whisperers hoarsely, and Castiel thinks, somewhat redundantly. They've barely done anything like this together, and yet in other things they are so far ahead of their years, so much pain and loss, especially in one as young as Dean. Dean rises up and down again, Castiel fists the bed sheets as urgent warmth flares in his abdomen, pleasure snaking up his spine.

One hand finds Dean's waist blindly on the next rise and fall.

The other joins it soon after, while Dean grunts slightly, a rough noise at the back of his throat. He picks up speed, moving as quickly as he can and fighting the need to double over from sensation.

Somehow, with Castiel's hands now on him, the older man's feet pressed into the mattress as Dean bucks and writhes down, epithets and praise falling from his mouth, somehow Castiel grasps the notion that he's being ridden. Ridden into the mattress and at the same time, fucking upwards with deliberation as pleasure flares strongly and skates alone his nerves. It's glorious. The part of his mind that whispers guilt finally tired and curled up like a vicious old cat, and he's watching Dean come apart at the new sensation they have created together, teeth sinking into his full lower lip, hand gasping himself and jerking, twisting as he moans, moving up and down urgently.

Damp with sweat, tired and exhausted, opened out and scraped raw by orgasm, Castiel holds the limp body of the boy against his chest. Dean shivers with the last of his pleasure, stomach wetted again with it.

"Cas?" he finally murmurs, raw throated. "Tomorrow...can you just look happy? Just for me?"

Castiel rubs his fingers against the dips of Dean's spine.

"I'll be happy." He sighs. "You make me very happy...I just...I need time to work that out, when I wake up."

Dean tips up a little to look him in the face.

"You're happy now?"

Castiel holds him a little tighter.

"Very."

_Everything looks different in the morning._

It's something Castiel's mother used to say, and he knows she meant that problems which arise for us one day can be diminished by distance in time.

In this case however, he wakes to realise the enormity of the undertaking he has committed to with Dean. To be a couple, lovers, in the public eye...it's a fearsome trial that awaits them he knows. Trial by fire. Looking at the sleeping man beside him, he tries to hold onto the fact that it's worth it, whatever happens. In the wake of Father Gabriel's words he censors his thoughts, trying to crush and deny the words _sin, hell, damnation, corruption, iniquity, faggot, sin _as soon as his mind conjures them from whatever hole in his mind such filth and hash doctrine comes from.

He clears the concern from his eyes when he sees Dean stir. He will look happy. Dean makes him so happy and he should see, should get to witness the warmth that Castiel feels for him.

Dean is not fooled.

He wakes, sits up and looks Castiel in the eye. He brushes his lips against his forehead and leans against his shoulder.

"It'll be ok Cas, I promise."

For Dean's ability to see through him like a sheet of glass, Castiel is profoundly thankful.

With their naked limbs cleared away under pyjama pants, both sets belonging to Castiel, they pull together breakfast from his under stocked refrigerator and end up lying back in bed again to eat, despite the messy sheets. He can't bring himself to question it, the idea of sitting far enough from Dean to occupy separate chairs is one that is oddly unthinkable.

"So..." Dean gnaws at a pop tart, head resting against Castiel's leg. "I'm going back to college today."

Castiel runs his fingers over Dean's hair.

"I'm meant to be giving Michael a ride home...and I was thinking I'd tell him about us, the whole story."

"Is that wise?" Castiel asks.

"He'll have to listen at least, can't exactly bail out on the freeway." He turns a little. "plus, we'll have to tell people eventually, about how we met...just ,you know, not that we did anything while I was a minor." Dean shrugs. "and he's my friend...I think."

Castiel sighs.

"I realise that we must tell people our story." He dusts crumbs from his fingers. "But Michael already despises me for being far older than you...the truth about my former calling will only worsen his feelings...and your parents..." He shakes his head. "When your parents discover me for what I am, they will hate me."

"I won't." Dean sits up. "Anyone else...I've moved away from home, I can live without going back."

"That's not what I want for you."

"My decision, remember? I'll tell Michael, and my parents and Sam...and I'll try my hardest to make them understand – then it's up to them." Dean thinks for a moment. "Can I see you, next weekend?"

"Of course." Castiel touches the side of his face. "I'd love for you to come."

Dean smiles slightly.

"For a moment there..." He shakes his head.

"What?" asks Castiel softly.

"Nothing...you just looked happy." Dean murmurs.


	26. Chapter 26

He pulls up outside of Michael's parent's home and gets out of the car, crunching the gravel path under his boots as he crosses the neat front yard. Michael answers the door so soon after the knock that Dean wonders if he's been waiting for him, or at least listening for the sound of the engine. The other guy doesn't look like he's slept, dark circles a dead giveaway above the bruised mess that Dean left his nose in.

"You ok?" Dean asks, nodding at the damage.

Michael makes a noncommittal noise.

"Look...you can get in the car and listen to me...or you can get a ride from your parents and never speak to me again." Dean twists his keys in his hand and waits for an answer.

Michael leans back through the door and grabs his bag. "Bye Mom" he calls shortly, slamming the door behind him and walking past Dean towards the impala.

Dean sighs and follows him.

Fifteen minutes of awkward silence into the car ride home and Michael finally cracks.

"You spent the night with him."

"Yeah." Dean huffs tiredly.

Michael frowns down at his lap, breathing through his nose like he's really trying not to yell his knee jerk reaction and get thrown out of the car.

"Why?" he asks eventually, his voice small.

"Because it's been a long time since I saw him and I wanted to." Dean says evenly.

Michael processes this.

"I'm sorry about what I said...about Sam. That was out of line." He says quietly.

"Yeah it was..." Dean taps his fingers on the wheel awkwardly. "Sorry about your nose."

"It's fine." Michael says automatically.

Dean looks out at the road ahead.

"So...you want to hear about it or are you just gonna keep guessing?"

"I wasn't..."

Dean turns his face towards Michael, 'don't fuck with me' expression firmly in place.

"Ok, fine. I was..." Michael licks his lips. "I was...worried about you...yesterday. I didn't know where you'd gone and when I thought about it...I didn't know if I should have let you leave with him."

"My choice, not yours." Dean mutters. "And...you don't have to worry about Cas, he's more likely to hurt himself than me." He says quietly.

Michael looks at him.

"You're serious."

"Yeah." Dean says shortly.

Michael slumps in his seat a little, crossing his arms defensively.

"If you want to tell me...I wouldn't blame you if you didn't..." he begins.

"I want to." Dean says. "But I'd have to tell you everything, about me, about Cas...and it's not all stuff you're going to like." He says quietly.

"Probably not." Michael agrees. "but I won't know that until you tell me."

Dean drums his fingers lightly on the steering wheel.

"Ok..." he sighs. "So...I was sixteen, and I went to church every week with my parents, they were good friends with Father Sandover there and I was...I was doing ok, minor slights like stealing and skipping school." He remembers it for a distance, being that young and naive. "I got that I liked thinking about men...really liked it...and it scared me that it was happening to me all of a sudden, you know? Like my brain was someone else's and I couldn't make it think the right way."

Michael listens, recognising his own pain in Dean's memory.

"But I just ignored it, I guess...I thought about it when I was...when I needed to think of it. Then I just shut it out, I didn't want to screw any of my friends, or any guys I knew... it was all just abstract." Dean swallows and licks his dry lips. "Father Sandover...he retired, and we got a new priest...and I...I could not stop looking at him."

Michael feels a hitch of unease.

Dean feels his eyes prickle at the remembered guilt, hot and thick and heavy in his chest as he'd looked at the new priest, Father Castiel Novak – still young and fresh compared to the other priest and to the men Dean already knew of that age. Father Castiel who'd shaken Dean's hand in his parent's front room, vague and detached as Dean had sweated under his gaze, trying not to notice the smoothness of the man's neck, the delicateness of his wrists and the hard lines of his body under his dark pants and shirt. The soft mound of creased fabric at the crux of the priest thighs, pulled just tight enough to display the vague outline of the man's cock underneath.

Dean had touched himself to that little visual, upstairs in the bathroom, as his parents drank tea with the new priest downstairs. He'd come into his hand thinking of his skin, his lips and that quick hint of pink tongue as he'd moistened them before speaking. Dean remembered that, and that afterwards, panting, he'd looked into the mirror above the sink and he could swear he'd felt his soul shrivel and sicken over what he had done.

Michael's words jump him out of his thoughts and set him back in the moment, where his eyes and hands had been following the road automatically.

"So...you had a crush on him? Your priest?" Michael asks slowly, then realisation dawns. "It was Castiel." He says blankly, looking sideways at Dean. "Castiel...he was a priest...your priest?" Michael looks aghast, disgusted and numb with horror.

"Started like that." Dean says, quickly cutting across Michael's gathering tirade. "It kind of...it just grew, each time I saw him...he was so _good, _I mean, he was the nicest guy I'd ever met. Kind to the whole congregation, nice to Sammy when he was doing alter service."

Michael snorts despite himself.

"I will bust your nose again if you even think about..."

"I'm not." Michael snaps. "Just...you're talking like he's a fucking saint, and all it took was what? You looking at him a bit too often and he decided to..." Michael clenches his hands into fists. "You were a kid, Dean. He was older, he was a _priest,_ and no matter what anyone thinks about priest's they are supposed to know what is right, to be able to control themselves."

"He did." Dean growls. "You have no idea what he did to..."

"Doesn't matter, Dean..." Michael touches his arm. "If he...if he forced you...or if he somehow, made you think that it was ok?...you can tell someone, you should, tell, someone."

"I'm still telling the story, aren't I"? Dean glowers out at the road. "Trust me, he didn't..." he shakes his head. "Just listen." He clenches his hands on the wheel and continues with less lightness than before. "So I'm going to church every Sunday and just...watching him. Feeling like...the biggest pervert out there because it's wrong and he's my priest...but..." Dean frowns at the windshield. "I started going to confession during the week, just to hear his voice, I thought about him all the time and every time I worked myself up, every time I..." he darts an embarrassed look at Michael. "...took care of it...I felt worse, I felt like everything I did just made it worse, made it burn a little more...a whole freaking year of seeing him and talking to him and fucking _dreaming _about him." He takes a corner with a little more force than necessary. "I went to confession...I told him."

Michael waits a couple of minutes.

"And then what?" he says, grudgingly.

"And...he said he could help me, that he'd felt the same when he was a teenager...but that maybe another priest would be better. I told him I wanted him."

"Hmmm..." Michael says softly. Dean takes this as the green light.

"And he tired, he told me how to get rid of the urge, how to block it out...it worked."

"Why would he do that? That's..." Michael makes a sharp gesture. "That's like torture Dean...that's grade A, fanatical psychobabble..."

"And he believed every word." Dean points out. "He had some kind of bullshit hard line catholic upbringing and...I think he was really trying to help." Dean taps idly at the indicator. "Anyway...I guess we were both having trouble with being so close all the time...and then...I found out after, that he'd stopped eating, kept cleaning the rectory 'stead of sleeping...and he used to take these ice baths..."

Michael sucks in a sharp breath.

"Yeah...I went by to see him, after he'd told me we shouldn't see each other anymore...he was passed out in the tub, probably about to drown..." Dean frowns at the mental image. "And I dragged him out, got him dry, sat up next to him in bed to keep him warm...make sure he was ok. And...after that I knew I wasn't going to leave him, not ever."

Michael looks down at the rubber mat under his feet.

"He let me come and see him more after that, we hung out, watched movies...he read to me...after a while I asked if I could sleep with him." Dean catches Michael's look. "Actually sleep, in the same bed. We did, it was nice." He braces himself. "Long story short? I was the one who...I wanted him so much and I didn't have the control that he did. We were in bed...I took my clothes off and...he let me." He grimaces. "I know how that sounds, but he wanted me and he knew I wanted him...I just..." he shakes his head.

"Dean..."

"He's not a bad person, and right after he said we had to separate...he moved away, I didn't see him again until last night and...well that was because of you." Dean says in a rush. "I know we had a thing...and I'm sorry that you got caught up in me trying to figure this mess out...but you're the reason I was there last night and I want to be grateful...so don't get pissed and righteous at Cas because trust me, he's given himself worse."

Michael takes a deep breath.

Dean waits.

"I'm not mad." Michael says softly. "I mean...I still want to talk the guy...but you're pretty convinced that it's genuine, that he isn't...and it sounds like this stuff happened, it's not just...a way of seeing that he forced on you." He says awkwardly.

"Michael...thanks." Dean sighs. "I know this is a lot..."

"Yeah...it's huge, Dean...but..." he shrugs. "I have to deal or lose you, right? So I can try to understand at least, I owe you that."

Dean doesn't say anything, just drives towards the dorm in silence. There's nothing else to say, and he gets the feeling that if he pushes too far, Michael will freak out.

He wonders how many times he will tell this story, to Sam, to his parents, maybe to the police if someone gets them involved, lawyers, friends, relatives, strangers...it's his story and he'll spend the rest of his life passing it out to other people, trying to make them understand what was once so confusing, and yet now seems so concrete.


	27. Chapter 27

_Little update for you because I'm packing to go home and I wanted to establish a little bit of a relationship before hurricane 'telling the folks' arrives. _

Castiel answers the phone right away, and Dean drops onto his bed and leans back against the headboard.

"Hey." He says softly, and he can hear the light in Castiel's voice when he snaps out of his prescribed telephone manner and says, "Dean!" like he's surprised to hear from him.

"Yeah, don't think I'm letting you go that easily." He murmurs. "I talked to Michael...and he's, not ok, but getting there."

"I'm glad, you deserve a friend in this." Castiel settles down in his armchair and listens to Dean's voice.

"So...how are you feeling?" He asks.

Castiel thinks for a second.

"I miss you." He says, finally. "And I want to see you again, soon."

Dean smiles against the receiver. "That's the best thing I've heard all day."

"It's not a bad feeling either." Castiel points out. "Missing you, now that I know you're coming back."

"That's anticipation Cas." Dean smirks. "Plus, it means I've got a week to think of things to do to you." He falters in the silence his words leave behind. "Sorry...that was ...I didn't mean to freak you out."

"Dean." Castiel interrupts, and Dean recognises the strange, rough lilt to his voice that always marked his struggles for control. "One week."

And Dean smiles a little at the wave of desire that does through him, desire which he is allowed to feel.

For a month, one month which marks the true beginning of the most significant sexual relationship either of them have ever had, everything is perfect.

Dean spends each weekend with Castiel, driving back to the other man's tiny apartment, greeting Montag, cooking dinner for him and Castiel and then taking long walks around the town after dark, coming back to read or watch TV. Night by night they catch up on what they've missed, for Castiel, eighteen years of celibacy and denial, for Dean? Three years without his first love.

Dean looses count of the number of times he watches Castiel unravel beneath him, over him. Feels him come inside, across his stomach - and later, when Dean decided he wants to try something, something strange and right and newly _permitted_ – within his mouth.

Castiel, warm, burning hot and open to him, sucking gently at his lower lip or crying out to the dark bedroom.

Dean falls just a little more in love with him every time.

He gets to watch Castiel _laugh. _Actually laugh, mouth wide open and eyes crinkled up, body shaking under its sheet. He realises that Castiel needs to shave every five damn minutes, and that when he doesn't get out of bed for almost two days he accumulates a layer of fascinating scruff that scratches Dean's throat when he buries his face there.

Castiel becomes obsessed with touching Dean, a hand on his arm as he makes cups of coffee, putting his feet up in Dean's lap as they sit watching TV, fingering his hair, kissing his jaw and sleeping curled to his side. After so long without touching he can't stop. He touches Dean for comfort, for reassurance, to please him, to feel him. He touches him because, he, _can – _and it's wonderful.

After the month, their first month, there isn't a place on Castiel's body that Dean hasn't touched, licked, rested his head against or slept with his arms around. He's intimately acquainted with Castiel's hardness, the weight, the taste and texture of it. The way Castiel responds to each pressure point and touch, that peculiar bone deep moan that he lets out when Dean tentatively tongues the head. The way it feels when it's soft in his hands or inside of him.

It's a month that creates memories for them – so many firsts. Memories of their first night at the movies, their first restaurant dinner and the first time they go to a bar – the first bar Castiel has been to, period.

Dean holds the remembrance of those nights with him through the week, tapping his pen against his literary anthology and thinking idly of the moment Castiel had pressed him against the mattress and whispered,

"I know it's not the sacristy..." dipping down to touch the soft, wet circle of his mouth to the tip of his dick. Dean's fantasy since he was sixteen.

And it only adds to the overwhelming freedom, the happiness of that month.

It's not the start of them, but the solidification of their foundations, Dean thinks in his lazy moments. It's almost like a marriage, that they're anchoring themselves together, tying themselves to the mast.

Preparing to weather a storm.


	28. Chapter 28

_When I said that I would kill you last...I lied. So yeah, didn't even make it a week without updating, it's actually medicinal – it helps my coursework writers block I swear Next update might take a while as it's going to be a but fraught and emotional. Got to look up some synonyms for 'angrily'._

Dean sketches out a plan on the inside cover of his Lit anthology during a particularly dull lecture. It goes something like this –

Come out to Sam.

Come out to Mom and Dad.

Tell Everyone about Cas.

Graduate and move in with Castiel.

He admits it's overly simplistic, but it's pretty much everything on his life 'to do' list right now.

He paces his dorm room that night, drumming the phone against his palm and wondering what the hell he's going to say. 'Hey Sam, you know the family priest who you really liked before he just up and left the parish? Well, I'm screwing him. I've been in love with him since I was your age and he love me too and it's the best thing that's ever happened, EVER in the history of everything. Because he loves me back – and we're going to be together, after everything.'

Yeah, because that's going to cut it.

It sounds ridiculous whenever he tries to explain how he feels. Feelings have never been his strong point, he's spent too long either trying not to have them or trying not to show them. Hauling everything to the surface, for someone who isn't Cas feels...wrong, somehow. Like Castiel obtained a direct route under his skin and that connection somehow makes it easier to talk to him about all the emotional stuff flying around his head.

But Sam's his brother. Dean reasons that he'll never be properly close with Sam until he knows the truth about the last three years.

He dials his home number and waits for Sam to pick up.

"Dean?" Sam's half puberty mangled voice comes onto the line.

"Hey Sam...can we talk?" Dean flips the anthology closed.

"We are...well, I'm talking and you're being weird." Sam rambles.

"Shut up." Dean says automatically. "Listen...I have something to tell you."

"Shit, what's wrong?" Sam yelps.

"Nothing, stop being such a..." Dean sighs. "Look, don't tell Mom or Dad right now...but...oh, fuck this is hard..." he trails off. "Oh screw it, I'm gay, alright?"

There's a slight pause.

"Well...duh." Sam huffs.

"What?" Dean blinks, waiting for the expected reaction of confusion and upset.

"Dean...you've never had a real girlfriend, you spend way too much time with Michael and...well, we used the same computer for years Dean, you never cleared the history."

Dean flushes.

"So, is it Michael?" asks Sam interestedly. "You two decided to get serious?...is he going to make an honest woman of you?"

"Bitch." Dean mutters. "No it's...uh, someone else."

"No! Michael's nice, he took me out to the museum last time you were home, remember?"

"Sam, that's not really how great relationships are founded." Dean gripes.

"No, but..." Dean can almost feel Sam frowning on the other end of the phone. "Is it because he likes someone better? Or, he doesn't want to deal with Dad...or, I don't know, is his penis..."

"Sam!" Dean shuts his eyes and slaps a hand against the wall. "It's not...no penis talk ok? You're my brother."

"Sorry, but I liked him. Who's this other guy then? The 'better than Michael' guy." Sam had to be the neediest kid brother alive.

"He's not better, just...I love him. That's it." Dean tries to down play it but underestimates how much of a girl Sam can be.

"You love him?" Sam squeaks. "Oh my God, seriously?"

"Yes, and shut up."

"Do I know him? Is it one of your friends?"

Sam's puppyish enthusiasm makes him feel bad about keeping it a secret. Knowing that all the happiness his brother feels for him will dissipate once he hears the news that it's Castiel that Dean's attached himself to.

"He's uh...look, I'll tell you next time I come home ok? I need to explain a few things."

"It's not bad is it? Like one of your teachers? Someone's dad?" Sam guesses childish horror in his every word.

"Look, Sam, I'll tell you when I come home, but you've got to promise not to tell Mom or Dad until I decide to."

There's a slight pause.

"They're going to freak." Sam says quietly.

"I know." Dean groans.

"No, Dean – They. Will. Freak." Sam insists, deadly serious. "Charles Shirley, that guy in my English class? He came out last year and they made him leave the church – Dad agreed with it."

"Well then they'll hate me for life." Dean says with a great deal more belligerence than he feels. "I've still got you, right?"

"Sure...but I bet he's not as great as Michael" Sam insists.

"He knows twice as much nerdy crap, and he can make pancakes." Dean says bluntly.

"Good pancakes or your kind of pancakes?" asks Sam after a slight hesitation.

"Slit your throat and die, they are so beautiful type pancakes." Dean confirms, choosing not to point out that Castiel has been teaching him how not to clump all the batter together and burn it into nuggets.

"Hmmm." Says Sam noncommittally, before launching into a story about someone in his home economics class setting fire to the stove.

Dean breathes an internal sigh of relief. He's still got Sam at least, and Sam accepts at least half of his decision to be in love with Castiel, publically and wholly. After the conversation winds down he hangs up and calls Castiel to tell him the good news, only to find that Cas himself is in a terrible mood.

"What happened?" he asks to Cas's tired 'hello'.

"Ruby, in a word." Castiel sighs. "She believes me to be an abomination, and one which should not be allowed to work in the parts of the library where I might encounter children who are 'vulnerable' to my influence."

Dean says something entirely appropriate but unrepeatable, featuring the words 'Bitch' 'Stick' and 'Fist'

"Quite." Murmurs Castiel, sounding vaguely appalled but heartened. "I've filed a complaint but...it's unpleasant to deal with, to hear one's own worst beliefs about oneself spoken to your face..."

"I wish I was there." Dean sighs.

"I wish you were too." Castiel says, and Dean wonders where he's sitting, curled up in a ball and watching Montag prowl around on the floor or bunched up in bed.

"Cas...after graduation...what are we going to do?" he asks.

There's silence on the line.

"I'd thought that...well...it's a little assuming to think that you'd move in here, but I'd like to...you don't have to stay here..."

"Cas, would you like to live with me?" Dean asks firmly.

"Yes...but not if you have other...wants." Castiel finishes lamely, clearly uncomfortable with what he saw as coercing Dean into a decision.

"Castiel I'd like to live with you, and your slut of a cat." He says formally.

Another pause stretches between them.

"Good...ok." Castiel says in a small, pleased voice.

Dean crossed two items off of his list and reflected that the remaining two might as well read 'perform open heart surgery on myself' and 'climb mount Everest afterwards' for all the chance he had of completing them easily and painlessly.


	29. Chapter 29

_Oh my god! Another update – I've made some progress on the old school work – this is my reward _

"..."

"Say that again." His mother asked softly, watching his dad out of the corner of her eye as John continues to sit in apocalyptically damning silence.

Dean scuffed his feet on the carpet under the dining table.

"I'm gay." He repeats.

He thinks he's handling this rather well, or at least as well as he can given the circumstances. It's been three weeks since he'd told Sam what his brother apparently already knew. Now he's sat his parents down and told them the unvarnished, un-hallmark-sentimented truth. He's gay. He's a homosexual, he's been attracted to men in the abstract since he can remember, and one in particular for a good long while.

It's easy to know that, quite another to get it across without inspiring the God awful vision his parents might possibly be nursing right this second – of their son sinning with a man.

"You're..." his mother lets the other words stick in her throat, glances at her husband, then back to Dean. "Honey..."

"What do you mean 'I'm gay' where the hell did that come from?" his dad finally says accusingly.

"Well...I don't know, a lot of people think we're just born the way we are...maybe it's something environmental, psychological..." Dean rolls his eyes at himself. "I'm just...gay, dad, I can't explain why."

"Environ...you're saying we did this to you?" his dad says incredulously.

"John, that's not why he said." Mary soothes. "Dean, sweetie...have you thought maybe that...you could...not...be...gay?" She stumbles.

"I tried, mom." Dean says, clenching his hands together as he remembers just how hard he'd tried. "I really did, since before I turned fifteen it's just been there...and...I tried not to feel it, not to see the way I did, but..." He swallows a ball of apprehension. "I shouldn't have to try, I'm gay and that's...that's fine."

Mary looks at him in silence, digesting this.

"It is not 'fine'." John's eyes are wide with incredulity. "Dean, it's a sin for a reason! It's..." he frowns. "You want people to think you're a freak? To treat you like a deviant, like a diseased pariah...and then at the end of a life of that, get landed in hell for eternity?" He says softly.

"John...let's just...think about this." Says Mary, clearly struggling.

"He's my goddamn son Mary..." he glares at Dean. "You think I want that kind of life for you? People looking at you like you're...like you're disgusting." He thumps a hand on the table. "Which they will if you start getting involved with men like that, Dean...they're wrong, and whoever told you that it was 'fine' was clearly..."

"Father Gabriel." Dean says calmly. "Father Gabriel...told me that a sin is what diverts you from God, and I've tried so hard not to be this way that I wound up hating God for taking me away from the man I..." he falters, aware suddenly that he's laid more bare than he intended.

"The man you...love?" Mary asks quietly. "You're...involved, with someone?" He voice treads a knife edge between happiness and mistrust.

"Father Gabriel...is the priest in Michael's home town, couple of miles over...isn't he?" his father says, taking a different tack. "Are you...did Michael put you up to this? Are you involved with him?"

"I am not dating Michael!" Dean says, with possibly too much vehemence. "But he took me to see his priest to get some advice...to help me see that God never wanted me to live alone."

"So who are you seeing?" his mother questions.

"Father Campbell, that's who you're going to be seeing." His dad says firmly. "Get this liberal, road to hell bullshit balanced with the truth, Dean, the bible is clear about this."

"I'm not going to see Father Campbell, and I'm not going to change my mind about this." Dean says firmly. "I'm gay, I'm having..."

"I don't want to know!" booms John.

"...a consensual, adult relationship, with another man." Dean continues doggedly.

"Dean..." his mother says softly.

"I don't want to think of you...like that." Says John quietly.

"I'm not asking you to, I'm asking you to respect, my choice...to understand that I'm choosing to go with my nature on this, and to at least try to accept it." Dean looks his father in the eye. "I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't sure. I'm sure, dad."

Mutely his father shakes his head, looking down.

His mother looks on the verge of tears already, and this newest declaration of his certainty apparently doesn't help.

"I wish you'd stayed here." She says shakily. "Kept with the church instead of going off...going off..."

"Mary." John warns.

"No...I..." she shakes her head and her face crumples. "I wish you'd stayed, and that we'd been allowed to help you with this...we could have fought for you, made it easier...we could have gone to see Father Novak together...gotten you some help."

Dean hopes he isn't flushing as much as he thinks he is.

"Mom...this really isn't down to you." He tries to say, calmly. "This is something that will always be with me, has always been with me..."

"Fight it." John says at once. "You think we don't all have to fight to be decent? To choose the right thing over the easy thing or the pleasant thing?" he insists with all the soft, sure, belief that Castiel used to instil into the doctrines of the church. "Being good, being saved, is all about fighting. No one ever beat the devil with words, it takes weapons, Dean, and it takes strength."

"I've been strong." Dean spits out. "I've had the 'weapons' that the church thought I needed, I've seen them work and they never seem to destroy sin...they hurt the poor bastard who's trying to use them." He breathes heavily and reins himself in. "I'm being strong now, because this? Not easy dad, not by a long shot...living the life I'm looking at? Also, not easy. But I want it enough to try. To fight for it."

His parents look at him, his mother tearfully worried, his father, glowering but with something like grudging respect buried deep in his eyes.

"Tell me who he is." John says softly.

"Dad." Dean warns. "Don't, not yet."

"Why? You want to fight for him you can start now, tell me his name." John says, a set to his shoulders that denies all argument.

"I can't." Dean pleads softly. "Not now, you're mad, you're..."

"Tell me, the goddamn name, Dean." He growls, and Mary almost flinches at the blasphemy.

"No." Dean maintains, softly, trying not to cave or wither under the strength of his father's anger.

John thumps the table, once, hard. It makes both Mary and Dean jump and makes Sam, whose listening at the top of the stairs, scuffle quickly back into his room.

"You tell me, or you can get out of this house and not come back."

"John, no." Mary snaps. "Dean, stay exactly where you are."

"No, I'm going." Dean gets up and looks down on his parents. "Dad..." he sighs. "I'll give you a month, just...think about it, get used to it...when you're ready? You can meet him." He turns and walks out of the house, towards his car, without listening to his Father's angry buzz of threats behind him.

At the car, he turns, waves to Sam, watching snub nosed at his bedroom window, then gets into the impala and drives away down the street.

Halfway to the turn off for the highway to college, he changes his mind, flips open his cell and dial's Cas's number.


	30. Chapter 30

_Another chappie up - oh BobbleHeadedJesus, where art thou? Anyway, there appears to be a split between 'Dean should tell his parents about Cas' and 'Dean should keep schtum'. Now, I always thought he had to tell them, but after those reviews I got to thinking aaaaannnd – this chapter happened, so thanks guys, for making me consider an angle that had not previously occurred to me. _

Castiel opens the door in dark sweat pants and a grey T-shirt, clearly ready for bed and waiting up for Dean's arrival. He accepts Dean into his arms without complaint, hugging for a moment on the threshold before he closes the door and brings Dean a little further into the apartment.

"What happened?" he asks softly as Dean draws away and sits on the couch.

"Ugh..." Dean shakes his head and drops his forehead into his hands. "Just tell me one day we'll have our own place with like, a bazillion cats and a huge perimeter fence to keep this bullshit out."

"That bad?" Castiel drops gracefully into a couch cushion and folds his knees up to his chest, worry pinching his features.

"Dad told me to leave and not come back...oh, and I'm going to hell." Dean tries to be flippant but he feels like someone's busted his nose from the throbbing in his temples and the tears burning behind his clenched eyelids. "They're probably not going to let me near Sam anymore."

"Dean..." A light hand touches his shoulder tentatively, hovering just slightly above his cotton covered skin. "I'm sorry...I..."

"It's not your fault." Dean grits his teeth and tries to control everything within his mind. "It's not even them it's just...the way things are, the way they've been...it doesn't change just because we want it to...and I still have to tell them..." he grimaces. "They'll hate us both for that."

"They won't hate you." Castiel says softly.

Montag mewls quietly.

"Yes, they will." Dean chuckles drily, bitterly. "I made you fall from grace Cas...the way my Mom talked about you? Like you were her...guardian angel or something, best priest she's ever known..." Dean draws in a choked sob. "If she knew what I've thought about you...what I've gotten you to do with me..."

Castiel jerks his hand away from Dean's shoulder.

"Cas..." Dean looks up at him. "Cas...I'm sorry, I..."

Castiel sizes his arms and presses Dean back and down, onto the couch, covering him and holding him down with the weight of his body. He lowers his mouth to the shell of Dean's ear and speaks softly, his hold on the man underneath him slackening now that he's gotten him to lie there.

"You were, and are...the best thing to happen to me. Living a life like mine...you are everything I never had, all I wanted..." He says seriously, breath hastened by the brief exertion and the force of his sentiment. It goes softer still, warm and fluid, barely audible. "The things I do with you...I do because I choose to."

"I know..." Dean's soft exhalation is caught by Castiel's mouth, pressing to his gently and drawing the breath up from him. He shifts back a little.

"You deserve to have your family, Sam and your parents...to have that life." Castiel traces his clavicle thoughtfully. "Perhaps you shouldn't tell them about me."

"I want to." Dean insists. "What else am I going to do? Keep you a secret for the rest of my life?"

"It might be better." Castiel says in a small voice. "They might accept you for being gay, in time...but this, this is a sight more damning, even in accepting eyes."

Dean looks up at he, piercing eyes arguing every word mutely, even as some inner mechanism seems to turn at the thought, working it out and perhaps, maybe, agreeing. Castiel waits patiently, watching Dean think.

"They'll never understand will they?" Dean says finally, quietly.

"I don't think so." Castiel replies evenly.

"I tell them...they'll never speak to me again... if I'm lucky." Dean lies flat on the couch and runs his hands up Castiel's back, as if reassuring himself that he's there with him. "If I'm not...they could make all kinds of trouble for us...drag us to court if they have to." He nudges his nose alongside Castiel's and feels their breath mingle between their lips. "I'm still gonna tell them." He whispers.

"Why?" Castiel presses a little closer, smaller and more compact that Dean has ever been, easily supported by him and held by him as they whisper, even there is no one but Montag to overhear.

"Because, if everyone knows? They'll be backlash. They'll hate me, or both of us. Everyone will find out and people like Ruby? They'll be a major problem..." he cups the side of Castiel's face. "But then _everyone _will know." He breathes. "The only reason I have you, the only reason...is because I told you what I was...because I told Michael enough for him to take me to Father Gabriel, and because you told him enough for him to work it out." He swallows. "Keeping silent? It's just a way to lose out...if I lie to my family, I will lose them, so why not lose them with the truth?" his voice shakes despite his efforts.

Castiel looks deep into him, and not for the first time Dean wonders just how easy he is to read, now that Castiel is not blinded by his own fear.

"You're a very brave young man." Castiel says, plainly, in that odd priestly way of his. "I wish I had a hundredth of that strength."

Dean flushes and indicates their position.

"I think you already do."

Castiel kisses him.


	31. Chapter 31

_Supernatural, you know, that show I like to bastardise here, is really really making my soul hurt. Poor Cas, poor Dean – may they be delivered from suffering and onto their marriage bed by 7.01_

_BTW – totally called Crowley being alive, but so did a bajillion other people. _

Dean figures that there has to be a way to tell his parents about Castiel without them, A) going to the police or B) his Dad tearing Castiel apart.

"I can't think of one." Castiel grumbles from his place, hunkered near the headboard and glowering into his coffee. Castiel, after a few years out of the priesthood, has lapsed into the happy territory of not being a morning person – especially after a late night.

"Over the phone?" Dean scratches at his thigh lazily and offers Castiel half of his breakfast waffle, which the older man declines.

"Dean." Castiel glowers pointedly.

"Ok, face to face it is." Dean sighs. "We could put you in an adamantium box." Castiel looks at him blankly, Dean's smirk fades. "It's what Wolverine's claws are made of."

"Who's Wolverine?" Castiel asks politely.

"A character in a comic book." Dean grunts over his coffee. Castiel frowns at this and thinks for a second.

"If he is fictitious how can we build a box from a material that is also fict..."

"Forget it." Dean groans. "You're lucky you're pretty."

Castiel blinks sleepily, trying to decided whether to be insulted or not, and settles on being happily distant.

"Right, we have a few options here." Dean grouses, ticking said options off on his fingers. "I can tell my parents sooner rather than later, I can do it with or without you being there, and I could tell Sam first if I wanted to." Dean sighs. "I just can't work out which way to do it. Which is the right way?"

"I doubt there is one...sorry." Castiel says after a moment's thought and in response to Dean's glare.

Dean subsides onto the mattress.

"I can tell Sam, he might...I mean out of all of them, he's the one that stands the best chance of understanding this."

"And if he tells your parents in a fit of pique?"

"I'm codenaming that possibility "World ends and we die"." Dean sighs and rolls to the side, laying his head on Castiel's shoulder and smoothing a hand down his chest and under the sheet. Castiel rumbles approvingly and closes his eyes as Dean's fingers start to work.

"We were discussing..." he says half-heartedly. Dean shifts a little more on top of him.

"I can leave it for an hour."

"Or more." Castiel mutters, carefully nudging Dean in between his legs and pulling him down over him.

They're being careful with each other on the subject of sex now. Scaling back but both knowing the reason why. Dean is fretting over his corruption of a priest, Castiel worries that his own desire might disturb Dean. With the oncoming storm that is the confrontation with Dean's parents looming, both of them try not to rake new sores upon their individual weaknesses.

So they work around their own staggering blocks, like a small river through acres strewn with ruins.

Dean returns to his deliberations later, a little rumpled and listening to Castiel in the shower, occasionally calling out his thoughts on the matter.

"I should tell Sam first, kind of test for Mom and Dad right?"

Castiel 'MMmmm's ' politely in response.

"So, I can do that face to face and then...I don't know, if he wants to meet you he can?" Dean says, mostly to himself. "That means getting him to meet me without Mom and Dad finding out right away."

"Secrecy might undermine your point." Castiel counsels, returning from the bathroom in a robe and hunting in the dresser for some clean clothes.

"Secrecy's kind of necessary." Dean grumbles, sliding out from under the sheets and padding towards the shower. Castiel glares in mock indignation at his naked back, sloping to his bare ass and legs.

"Modesty might also be considered a necessity."

Dean smirks to himself as he closes the bathroom door, feeling the warm steamy air settle around him and the scent of Castiel's soap circulating through the steam and over his skin. Such displays are common place now, and it is not innocent teasing nudity that causes them their painful introspections, but the thought of how it might be perceived by others.

Dean turns the water on, hot and fast, hammering onto the already wet, warm tile.

He was not being entirely flippant when he thought of their own home, surrounded by defences and holding them safe from the prying eyes of the world. He has wished, on and off over the last three years, that he could simply take Castiel away, somewhere clean and fresh, somewhere without prejudice and suspicion.

If such a place exists.

He wonders what it would be like to forget that a third of the world, maybe more, considers them unclean. That two thirds would condemn Castiel for his lust and affection for a younger partner, that the rest would either find them distasteful or a curiosity.

He imagines sleeping beside Castiel in a large bed, and though he cares little for interior design, the bed does appear to have white sheets, a thought supplied by his more symbolic mind. To sleep naked and wake naked, eat their breakfast and go about their business in uninterrupted innocence, without struggle, without pain.

Dean applies soap to his hands, washes, and begins to put together his speech to Sam, which will now have to wait until the next weekend.

"_Sam, I know this is going to seem strange, but don't get upset..."_

"_I've loved him a long time, and I want to be with him now..."_

"_He loves me too..."_

"_Please don't hate us..."_

He kicks each suggested line from his head as it occurs, Sam is intelligent, observant and not entirely blind to Dean's actions, as he had first thought. He can't blank him out now with platitudes and hallmark sentiments, like he's explaining death to a four year old.

"_Sam, before I went to college, you know I spent a lot of time with my friends, out late and sometimes overnight? Well, I was lying to Mom and Dad, really I was with the man I'm seeing now, and I wanted to be with him for the last three years, it's just things got complicated..."_

Dean sucks in a mouthful of water from the spray and spits into the drain.

"_Sam, when Mom and Dad thought I was with my friends at night...I was seeing Father Novak in his home." _

"Make of that what you will." He sighs into the water.

He'll tell Sam that, one simple line, and wait for the questions to come. Because Sam will have questions, and Dean knows he will have to engage with them, answer them as they come and not cut them off with a speech. He's just worried about what Sam will ask, about what he will think of him and Castiel.

It occurs to him, somewhat belatedly, that the place he wants to be. The invented place he wants to escape to, already has a name.

Eden.

He smiles even though it isn't funny, closes his eyes and plunges his head under the streaming water.

If they ever had a paradise, they've long since been expelled from it. What comes now, he thinks miserably, but with a set to his shoulders that will only grow in strength as he continues to age, is toil. That is what the next few weeks will boil down to – Work, trial, pain and judgement.

He wonders why, in the Bible he's read since he was old enough to understand the thing – it never mentioned in the story of Adam and Eve, that upon their expulsion, their damning to the world of harsh thorns and eternal labour, that they still had eachother.


	32. Chapter 32

Sam stares straight out at the seals on their green slime covered rock, children mill around the railings, looking in while their parents survey the park at large.

They've been sitting on the bench for a while now, or perhaps it just feels like it because of the pervasive, awkward silence. Dean folds his arms across his stomach and glances sideways at Sam again. His brother is scrunched down in his parka, not looking at him, but letting his eyes trail from the seals to a point somewhere between his shoes and the low brick wall of the enclosure.

"Sam..."

"Shut up." Sam says blankly.

"Sammy..."

"I mean it, give me a second." Sam grits out. He lets air stream harshly out of his nose, rising in a white plume. Dean looks fixedly at the ground and tries not to hate the people around them so viciously for laughing and talking like everything's normal.

A bird chokes its cry out in a tree nearby; the sky is still as steely grey as it was ten minutes ago. Dean notes that it looks like rain. His hand feels strange when he clenches it, still adjusting to the new weight on his middle finger. The metal is cold in the freezing air, the band plain and gold. Castiel had given it to him awkwardly, muttering that 'he shouldn't take it the wrong way, but...he wanted him to have it' sliding his Father's old wedding ring onto Dean's finger to no resistance, the middle one, the only one it would fit.

They'd never really talked about Castiel's family, but from what Dean understood, the ring he was wearing was pretty much the last thing Castiel had of them.

"You gotta say something eventually." He prompts, as Sam remains stubbornly silent.

"Like what?"

"Whatever you want, just say something." Dean waits as Sam resumes his silence.

"You think all those seals are related?" Sam says distractedly.

"Sam!"

"What?" Sam bristles. "What do you want me to say here? Because I can't say I'm happy, or glad or...that you guys are so right for each other." Sam's face twists a little. "He's almost as old as Dad."

"No, he isn't."

"Close enough." Sam growls stubbornly. "I used to see him every week at Mass...he was nice to me, he was funny." Sam's pinched face is a monument to betrayal. "I thought he was so great, way nicer than Zachariah...and it was all because of you, wasn't it? Because he wanted you."

"Cas is a good man, he was an awesome priest." Dean defends, loyally. "He just...he chose it for the wrong reasons."

"Worked out pretty great for him though, right?" Sam utters humourlessly. "Led him right to you...you were my age, Dean, how is that right?"

"I was old enough." Dean says evenly.

"Really? Because I'm not." Sam's voice rises with anger. "Dean, if some guy...some thirty year old guy, was making a move on me, you'd kill him."

Dean swallows and scuffs the dirt under his foot.

"You hear about this kind of thing all the time." Sam stresses. "Priest's, teachers, coaches...a lot of the time it goes on for years because the kid they're...with, believes that the person hurting them, loves them. That it's a relationship."

"Sam, don't..."

Sam, veteran of lectures, informational TV and actually paying attention in school assemblies, doesn't let it slide.

"I get that you're...gay, alright? That's fine, good for you. But, the way we were brought up, makes it pretty easy for you to get confused, and for someone to take advantage of that."

Dean's hands clench on his knees.

"...that's how paedophile's work..."

"Don't you ever call him that!" Dean leaps up from the bench, voice loud enough to scare the cawing bird away and scatter the remaining children. Sam is white, two hectic spots of furious colour on his cheeks. His eyes are wide and afraid, worried by Dean's outburst.

"I'm twenty-one fucking years old." Dean growls, ignoring Sam's mild twitch at the profanity. "Do I look like a kid to you? No." Sam shrinks smaller and slides his hands up into his parka sleeves. "Sam...you know me, do you honestly think anyone could get me to do something I didn't want to do?" He pushes on as Sam remains mired in silence. "Do you think I'd be risking all this, if I wasn't sure about him?"

Sam looks up at him.

"Are you, sure?"

"Well, you and Michael both called him a pervert, and I still don't believe he is one." Dean retorts. "It's been years and I still want to be with him, still want to live with him when all of this is done." He laughs, strained and humourless. "If he is using me, he's in it for the long haul."

Sam looks upset. "Dean, I didn't mean to make you think that."

"Really?" Dean challenges. "Kind of seems like it's what everyone wants me to think...and I keep saying it isn't true...but sometimes..." He stiffens his spine and feels his jaw tighten with anguish. "Sometimes, the more you hear something, the more you think it's true...and I don't want to believe that, of him." He looks at his brother, and realises, horrified, that at some point he's lost a barrier to something and he's now quite close to tears. "Sam, I got convinced that I had some kind of...filth, in my mind. That I was sick for being like hundreds of thousands of other people out there...I don't want to lose him to another lie, just because people say it's so."

Sam stares off at the pavement, his face hardening.

"You can't tell Mom and Dad." He says finally.

"I have to."

"No, Dean, the gay thing? They might get over that, might." He stresses. "But if you tell them that you and Castiel are together, that you're staying together...they'll never accept that, they'll just cut you out."

"You saying you want me to stick around?" Dean says, half disbelieving.

"You're my big brother." Sam shrugs. "But Mom and Dad will freak out if you tell them, first born son or not."

Dean goes silent for a while.

"Guess I won't find out 'till I try."

Sam sighs.

"Is he worth it, really?" He asks, tentatively. "I mean...we're your family Dean, you had to know this wouldn't be completely ok with us, with them anyway."

"All the grief we've given ourselves and he's still the thing that makes me the happiest, out of everything I've got." Dean looks down at his hand. "Yeah, he's worth it."

Sam studies him closely.

"You know, I haven't seen him since he left the parish." Sam says conversationally.

Dean half smiles despite himself.

"You're terrible at subterfuge."

"Dean, I knew you were gay by the time I was twelve." Sam points out.

"Lucky guess." Dean retorts. He turns serious. "I left Cas in the car, parked up before I met you here." He says quietly. "You could see him, if you wanted."

"What would I say?" Sam raises an eyebrow, mouth turning down unhappily.

"You don't have to...but you said it, he's nice, and he's a little...fragile, about how we look to people...about whether this is right."

"And it would help if I saw him? Dean, I still don't know if I..."

"I know. But...maybe it would help if you saw him." Dean's face opens up, younger and pleading.

Sam thinks for a moment.

"Ok." He gets up. "Sure, lets go."

Together they cross the park, two figures in jeans and heavy jackets. The impala is parked a street away, Castiel sitting in the passenger seat, ghost like in a white shirt beyond the dark glass. His eyes flick between Dean and Sam, and Dean sees them widen imperceptibly, a silent question. He nods, and Castiel opens the door slowly, the clunk of the mechanism dull as he steps out onto the sidewalk, shivering in the cold.

"Cas...you remember Sam." Dean gestures between them.

"Hello Sam." Castiel says, with the kind of frown that says he's marshalling his words carefully, like a drunk aware that he might be caught out.

"...Mr Novak." Sam greets him awkwardly, the 'Father' conspicuous in both its absence and the pause it leaves.

"Well, this is awkward." Dean attempts to joke, earning a small smile from Castiel and an awkward huff of laughter from Sam.

"Someone should say something." Dean puts in.

Silence continues.

"You're in love with my brother?" Sam chooses to say, nailing the lightened mood right between the eyes.

"Yes, very much so." Castiel says, seriously.

Sam glares at him for a long moment, and to his credit Castiel doesn't blink.

"Can we get coffee?" Sam says suddenly, turning to Dean and shoving his hands in his pockets. Dean glances between them and nods slightly.

"Sure."

Sam turns and starts walking towards the Starbucks two streets over. He turns slightly.

"You coming Castiel?"


	33. Chapter 33

Dean barters Sam down to a hot chocolate and a scone, ignoring his brother's whines that he is old enough for coffee. Sam hyper is not for the faint hearted.

They sit at a corner table, Sam with his hot chocolate (which he has bedecked, despite his protestations of maturity, with cream, sprinkles and pink marshmallows rapidly melting into gum) - Dean with his mug of filter coffee, and Castiel, warming his hands around a cup of tea, a finger of biscotti on the plate next to it.

"You ok?" Dean asks him.

"Yes...why?" Castiel asks.

"You look kind of pale." Dean mutters casually.

Castiel attempts to marshal a smile, failing slightly. "I feel a little nauseous, I think it's the cold."

Dean shrugs off his plaid lined sweater and tucks it over Castiel's thin shoulders without comment.

Sam watches all this from behind his mound of confectionery. Dean, his brother, is acting like a normal man from a romantic movie, or a couple in the park near Sam's school. He squints at them, looking for hints that Castiel is somehow controlling his brother, but he has yet to spot even one. Dean paid for their drinks, taking Castiel's order because the older man is shy of speaking with the brisk counter staff, Dean prods Castiel into answering questions, and it is Dean monitoring Castiel's well being.

Castiel, Sam admits, if only to himself, is just a man. Normal, inconspicuous and mildly polite as he was when Sam first met him as a child. He is, perhaps not as old as Sam first thought either. Sam hasn't really seen Dean much since he went to college, and now he's had a good look at him he can see that his brother is every inch a twenty-one year old, and not eighteen which is how Sam remembers him. Castiel, conversely, is aging well, not greying yet and seems to get along with Dean the way Sam sees his Mom and Dad behave in public.

There's also the look Castiel gives Dean as the warm weight of the sweater settles over his thin shirt. Sam reads surprise, gratitude and pleasure there – as if he was not expecting this favour, and is glad that it came from Dean and Dean alone. Sam sucks cream and marshmallow goo off of his spoon, brow wrinkling in thought.

"You want some gummi bears on that, Bigfoot?" Dean smirks over his own coffee.

"Dean, I'm not a kid." Sam frowns, swirling sprinkles into his hot drink and watching them dissolve. Dean chuckles to himself and Castiel smiles in the way he used to when Sam cracked a joke before mass, that half-there-barely-noticeable smile.

It's still Father Novak, somewhere underneath the street clothes and his brother's sweater...only it's not. For one thing, he's not as skinny as he used to be, and he looks less pinched up around the eyes. Father Novak was serious, worried looking and whip thin. This man, Castiel, is slightly softer, like the focus on his image is lower, blurring him into his smile and his soft hair and his light eyes.

Sam wonders if it's Dean that did that, or if it happened by itself.

"Sam." Castiel begins awkwardly. "How are you doing in school?"

Dean laughs to himself, but Sam perks up, he likes talking about finals (for which he is totally prepared) and his plans for college (Stanford, he has their brochure pinned on the wall above his bed).

He and Castiel strike up a conversation about the relative merits of extracurricular verses academic solidarity on a college application, Dean accepts Castiel's biscotti as a bribe to let the conversation continue uninterrupted.

When Sam explains that he chose his literature class that year because they were doing Ray Bradbury, and he liked Dean reading him Fahrenheit 451, Castiel gets a funny look on his face and half glances at Dean. Sam watches his brother blush and look down into his empty mug, but doesn't press the issue. It's probably a couple thing.

He looks at Castiel, suddenly realising that Dean has had sex with this man. Then moves hurriedly away from the subject. He doesn't want to think of Dean naked, ever.

Castiel finishes up his tea and sets the cup down. Dean notices and raises his hand to the curve of Castiel's back.

"You want another one? Warm you up?" He asks gently.

Castiel smiles and nods gently.

"Sammy?"

"I'm ok." Sam raises his head and smiles, then blinks, startled. "Mom?"

Dean turns and sees his Mom, standing by the counter, take-out cup in hand and an uncertain, uneasy smile on her face.

"Dean? Sam?" She keeps smiling but her eyes travel to the third man at the table, a question in them. "Father Novak?"

They're frozen in an arrangement of silent terror as Mary's eyes take in Dean's hand, still resting on the back of Castiel's chair, and the jacket over the ex-priest's shoulders, that is too large and too scruffy to be anything but Dean's. Her smile wilts like a hot house flower in a blasting wind, eyes wide and almost afraid.

She shakes her head, an almost imperceptible motion, but there none the less.

"Mom..." Dean stands up and holds his hand up like he's trying to reassure a frightened animal.

Mary backs away.

"Sam, come with me, we're going home." Her voice shakes a little, but the hand she extends towards her younger son is firm.

Still, Sam retains his seat, and his mother's gaze, when it falls on him, is a shade from hysterical.

"Sam."

"Mom, I'm gonna stay." Sam says quietly.

Mary seems torn between wanting to drag Sam bodily from the room and not wanting to get closer to Dean and Castiel. In the end she turns and almost runs from the coffee house, leaving the patrons who have been watching this odd drama unfold, with only their coffees to entertain them.

Sam curls his fingers into his palms.

Castiel looks whiter than his shirt, eyes closed like he's in a day time soap and has just been given some really bad news. Dean just looks shell shocked, and kind of like he wants to hit something.

"Damn it." Is the first thing he says, sinking down into his seat and putting a hand on Castiel's shoulder. "I didn't want...oh shit." He shakes his head, as if he can't quite articulate how badly this has gone or how much he didn't want to be caught out like this.

Sam taps his hands on the table.

"I'll go get you that tea." The younger Winchester mutters, sliding out of his chair and bringing some change out of his pocket, he retreats to the counter to order the drink for Castiel, looking back to the two men still seated at the table. Dean has his arm around Castiel's shoulders, talking quick and softly, his face a mask of regret. Castiel reaches a hand to clasp the fingers on his shoulder, face tilted towards the table.


	34. Chapter 34

_I could probably drag this out for years. John and Mary and the saga de la gay priest – but I'm not going to. Mainly because I have a scary amount of WIP's that need to be tackled – but also, because I think I've said all that needs saying. To that end – here is the last chapter. I have grown fond of my montages. _

Dean strides up the short path to his parent's house, for it is most definitely their house, and not his. Not now.

Castiel is back in his apartment, like a precious thing in its battered protective casing. He had wanted to accompany him, but Dean had insisted that Castiel – looking paler and more sickly than he had before, should go to bed and try not to worry.

He had to do this alone anyway.

Sam was at the movies with one of his friends, Dean had paid him off and then taken him to the movie theatre himself, promising to pick him up after. Sam had looked at him for a long moment, shuffling a few crumpled fives into his pocket.

"It's going to be ok, Dean." Sam insisted, with all the optimism of someone who has never had to hide one part of who they are.

"I'll see you later." Dean had muttered, already looking ahead through the glass, hands drumming impatiently on the wheel.

Now, in front of the door, Dean raises his fist and raps on the wood. His stomach swoops with sick nervousness and his palms are already sweating. From inside he hears someone come close to the door, perhaps close enough to see him through the spy hole.

The door remains closed, the figure behind it attempting artful stillness. But Dean can hear them breathing.

"Mom?" he asks quietly.

A soft sound like a stifled sob or a squeak of shock comes through the door.

"Mom, please open the door."

Nothing happens.

"Is Dad there?"

There's a long pause.

"He'll be home soon. I called him."

"Can you at least let me in, so I can explain." Dean rests his fingers on the door, as if by doing that he can will it open.

"I don't want an explanation." Her voice is nervy. "Just tell me...tell me, that what I'm thinking, isn't true."

Dean swallows the acid laced anxiety, feeling it burn his chest and stomach from within.

"I'm...in love with, Castiel, Novak." He says quietly, the words simultaneously sand like and rapturous in his mouth.

Silence greets this proclamation, and Dean allows himself to hope that honesty might have struck a truce between himself and his mother.

"How could you do this?" He voice cracks.

"Mom...this isn't something I did." Dean points out.

"Both of you...he was our friend." His mother insists shakily. "And now he's taken you away from us, away from God and he..." a broken sound drifts through the wood. "He's...corrupting you..." the sound again.

"Mom, please don't cry." Dean murmurs to the polished surface of the painted door. His mother sobs again and he rests his forehead impotently on the wood, unable to offer any kind of comfort from outside of his former home. "Let me in."

"No..." Quavery and unsteady.

"Please." Dean pleads.

If he doubted the possibility of miracles, he is proved wrong. The door snicks open and his mother looks out at him, white faced and red eyed. Dean feels his own eyes burn in sympathetic misery.

"I'm sorry." Is the first thing to fall from his mouth. "I'm so sorry you found out like this."

"You were going to tell us?" Dean hopes he doesn't imagine the lilt of hope to her voice, of trust.

"I'm tired of lying." Dean lets out an unsteady breath. "But I am sorry, I didn't want to hurt you." Anything else is cut off when his mom raises her arms to his shoulders, enfolding him in a limp hug that slowly grows in strength until he's held almost too close to breathe. She pulls back only after a while, face contorted with grief and sadness.

"He was our friend." She says again, the weight of that condemnation dragging it to the ground like a lead weight.

"He loves me." Dean retorts calmly. Because it's true, and he's so tired of knowing it, of feeling it roll off of Cas in waves, and yet having it doubted by everyone else. "And he really does care about you..."

"He's taken our son." Mary cries loudly, voice cutting through Dean like a sharp wire. "He's..." her face twists, fresh tears falling. "...defiled my son."

"Dean, what are you doing here?" John's voice comes from over his shoulder, and Dean turns to face his father.

"I came to...I needed to explain myself."

John looks at him for a long moment.

"I don't want to hear it. And you're upsetting your mother." He steps around him and gently ushers Mary back into the house. He turns on the doorstep and looks down at Dean, eyes hardened with disgust and disbelief. "Don't come here again." He mutters.

And with that, the door to Dean's childhood home is closed in his face.

He picks up Sam, keeping it together long enough to gruffly answer Sam's questions and not break down in front of him. He drops him at the corner of the street, watches Sam walk away, towards the house he isn't welcome in. His only comfort is the slip of paper in Sam's pocket – the paper that has Castiel's address printed on it. Dean's there every weekend anyway.

Sam is old enough to make his own decisions.

The drive to Castiel's apartment is markedly less contained. Dean feels his mouth twist without his consent, misery brimming and subsiding in a dark tide. He gets to Castiel's home, opens the door with his key and shrugs off his jacket.

"Cas?" he calls into the darkness. No lights are on, unusual for the early hour. Dean frowns and hangs his jacket up, walking from the living room into the bedroom, which is also empty and dark.

"Cas?" he calls again, this time an edge of worry in his voice.

A sliver of light shows under the bathroom door.

Dean still has bad dreams (he will not think – nightmares) about finding Castiel, half drowned and half frozen in his bathtub – starved and insensible to his efforts to rouse him. He has awful dreams where he lies next to Castiel's swaddled body for hours, and the man never wakes – instead Dean knows inexplicably that he is in bed with a corpse.

He can't be blamed for the tremble in his hand, the kick to his heart, as he opens the door fully, showing the stark tile of the bathroom and the figure lying out on it, limp and lifeless. There's blood pooled by his hand.

"Cas!" Dean drops to his knees, hands grasping the white shirt and jerking the older man upright, into his arms. "Castiel..."

Blue eyes slide slowly open, looking at him blurrily.

"Dean?"

Dean grabs a towel and moves it to try and staunch Castiel's bleeding wrist, Castiel jerks away.

"Dean..." he catches the fearful look in Dean's eyes, looks again at his bloodied hand, and raises his unharmed hand to Dean's face. "Dean...it's fine, I cut myself, look..." he shows the thin scrape on the web of his thumb. "The cistern...has a jagged pipe."

Dean glares at him, fear and relief mixing to create irritation. "Why are you on the floor?"

Castiel instantly droops back against the wall.

"I think I have stomach flu." He groans unhappily. "I've been in here since I got back...I got tired so I..." he looks slightly embarrassed. "...napped, here."

Dean stares at him a moments longer, then drags him into a hug.

"Oh my God." He sighs to nothing in particular. "Never, scare me like that again."

"I'll try." Castiel wheezes, somewhere near his clavicle.

Dean releases him.

"Ok, let's get you into bed." He sighs, reaching to help Castiel to his feet.

"I'm not a child." The older man insists, but accepts the help graciously enough, moving delicately to the bed in the other room. He allows Dean to divest him of his shirt and pants, and to re-clothe him in his pyjamas. Dean wipes the blood from the cut and checks to make sure that it's closed.

Dean tucks him in and goes to fetch a glass of water and a bucket to place by the bed. When he gets back he feels Castiel's forehead.

"You are warm." He says uncertainly.

"I'll be fine." Castiel insists, weakly. "How are you?"

Dean shakes his head, getting up to remove his own clothes and dress for bed.

"I'm out, as far as they're concerned." He kicks off his jeans. "Out of the closet, out of the church, out of the house..." he strips off his shirt. "Out of their lives." He finishes, sliding into a T-shirt and a new pair of boxers. He slides in beside Castiel's slack form. "Kinda feels like freedom."

"I'm sorry." Castiel murmurs.

"It's them, not you – you were great." Dean smiles slightly. "Sam liked you."

Castiel seems genuinely pleased.

"Anyway – no talking, time for sleep..." Dean nudges Castiel pointedly. "Because you are sick, and you look...disgusting."

Castiel groans in offence.

"Like an extra from Outbreak." Dean continues, settling in for the night. "Besides, you know – everything looks better in the morning."

Everything is not better in the morning. It doesn't even look it, owing in part to Castiel's renewed nausea.

In terms of the actual time it takes for things to be even close to 'better' the effect is actually staggered.

It takes, for example, a week for Castiel to recover from the bug he'd been nursing. A week of Dean trying to keep the stubborn ass in bed and full of fluids (not nearly as fun as it sounded) and a week of Castiel being so weak and sleepy that he got rather into the daily re-runs of Dr. Sexy, much to Dean's amusement.

Another two months and Dean graduates.

Three months until he and Castiel move to a nice, single bedroom apartment close to Sam's campus, just in time for school to start. Dean gets a job as a mechanic, and wonders why the hell he bothered with college if his degree is this worthless. Castiel becomes a produce manager at Wal-Mart and spends every Thursday evening toting discarded vegetables to the soup kitchen three blocks away, and volunteering with the group there. He has, despite himself, not lost all of his desire to do God's work.

A year passes and Dean proposes, they get married a week later – a civil partnership that takes place on a trip to Belgium of all places. They bring back chocolate for both Sam and Father Gabriel – who has remained a somewhat close friend of Castiel and an acquaintance of Dean's.

Two years after that they are invited to the joining of Michael and his partner Adam. In the same year, Sam marries a girl named Jess – at the wedding Dean catches a glimpse of his parents, but they ignore him. Dean is Sam's best man – John and Mary are seated towards the back of the room at Sam's insistence. After all, Dean is not the family member he is ashamed of.

Dean writes to his parents every year. Every Christmas he sends them a card and each time his birthday comes around he sends them a letter with all the news of his new life in it. He refuses to send and re-send the same apology, and so instead he shows them that he and Castiel are happy. That Castiel is a good man and an excellent husband.

It takes five years for them to write back.

But they do.

Dean is the first to acknowledge that some things took time to come full circle.

It was just their nature.


	35. Chapter 35

Hello all,

Sorry if this in conveniences people, but this was the fastest way to get the word out to the people who above all others might be interested in my novel.

'Me and Mine', a story I hope you all enjoyed, has now been refined, lengthened to double its original size, with new content throughout and an extended, detailed ending.

Available for under a dollar (and under a pound) on the Amazon kindle store – there is a link to the page on my profile. This book has ruled my life for the past few months, and I am hoping to use to proceeds to find my masters degree in Creative Writing.

You can follow me at JollySnidge on twitter for more updates on the novel or on my other stories.

Thanks for reading this.

Here is a sampler – the beginning of chapter one.

Chapter One

It is known as 'Old town Folsom', what more can be said? The house is everything the newly married Samuel and Anne Walker imagined it would be when they moved to the town; neat and square and plain. This is the place, they decided, that their children would be born and raised in. Their eldest son is now almost eighteen and the house has not lost its charm for them; Samuel still walks up the short, straight path to the front door after work, the grass is kept a regimented two inches high and the three white columns by the front door are repainted every year to match the rail on the wraparound porch.

Anne and Samuel have enjoyed the sunset on that porch on almost every summer evening since they moved in. Even the fights they've had over college funds and missed anniversaries have been relocated to the porch in summer, so as not to waste the evening light.

It's the very latest part of summer now, edging closer to fall by the day. As when they were first married, tonight they share a jug of lemonade and watch the yellow disk dip below the horizon. In their younger days they'd watched their sons play on the lawn as the sun went down. Jude, then still a light brown haired blur of energy, had chased his younger brother across the grass at breakneck speed. Aaron had never seemed to mind the pointless game, tearing away from his older sibling and giggling fit to bust.

Now though, the lawn is empty, both Jude and Aaron are inside, ostensibly doing their homework.

"It's getting late." Anne comments, looking up at the indigo stained sky through her blond fringe.

"It'll be light for a while." Samuel is studying a dusty Ford car manual; his job selling second hand cars requires a certain amount of familiarity, though for his part, Samuel takes an extreme interest in knowing the ins and outs of every car on his lot. He's as broad and dark as his wife is fair and slender, a mixture that has come out well in their children. Both Jude and Aaron have light brown hair and clear skin, their adolescent growth spurts already promising a bulk that will rival their father's.

"We have church tomorrow. It's an early start." His wife remarks, Samuel sighs and closes the book, fingers rising and working to remove the creases from his brows and flatten his dark brown hair.

"You're probably right."

They take their glasses and the empty pitcher into the kitchen. Inside, the house is light and filled with the evening air. The tiles of the slanted roof over them are still exuding the day's heat, making the white painted hallways comfortably warm.

Standing at the bottom of the stairs, Samuel calls up to his sons.

"Boys! Time for bed!" He hears the rustling of pages and the shifting of feet. They're up rather too late, but he's inclined to give them some leeway, given the warmth of the night and the slowness with which the summer sun has set.

Upstairs, Aaron puts aside his comic books and looks at the hastily completed homework on his desk. He'll probably have to pay for that, come Monday. At fifteen he's not really at the age where forgetting or blowing off homework is acceptable, at least according to his Dad. Still, the lure of a new Spiderman edition was too much for Math to even compare.

He slides out of his weekend clothes, jeans and a new red T-shirt, straight into his pyjamas and then into bed. He clicks the lamp off within five minutes of his Father calling up to him. The walls of his room, bedecked in national geographic posters and pictures from the Harry Potter movies, are cast into shadow.

Across the hall, blanketed in semi-darkness, Jude is thinking of his own school work, neglected for a rather more pressing reason than a need to keep up with the adventures of Spidey.

Jude's room is the polar opposite of his brother's, the only posters to be found are old ones from his Father's extensive record collection. His unfinished algebraic equations are balanced on the glass cover of his very own record player, itself balanced on a rudimentary table composed of paperback novels.

Jude sits on the floor at the foot of his bed. Before his Father called up to him to get into bed, he had been playing a lengthy tournament of solitaire. The cards are still laddered in front of him, missing only very few, which he still holds in his hand. He hasn't turned the light off, having neglected to turn it on in the first place. He'd been too absorbed.

The game had taken maybe one tenth of his attention, the rest was all tied up in the fact that he could hear his parents talking outside of his window. The porch table and chairs were just outside and he could hear his Mother's voice, _"We have church tomorrow."_ The reason Jude could not concentrate long enough to tackle his work, was that he knew very well that they had church tomorrow. It was Sunday, they'd been attending Mass at St. Matthew's each Sunday for as long as he could remember. The thing taking up his mind was the way in which he was stuck between dreading the morning, and longing for it.

On the one hand, it was a chance to get out of the house, to gain some measure of peace whilst entrenched in the rituals of the church. It also meant seeing Father Gray again.

On the other hand...it meant seeing Father Gray again. Like a razor edged chalice, it was both a blessing and a surprising hurt.

This Sunday, this particular Sunday, was also the day Jude had promised himself, had promised God even, that he would confess. Of course he confessed every Sunday, he went into the wooden booth, breathed the incense laden air and confessed his sins to Father Gray in confidence. Jude had taken penance for lying, for selfishness and laziness; this however, was a far greater confession.

This was the heart of him.

The blurb is here –

When seventeen-year-old Jude Walker confesses to his priest that he's gay, and in fact has an unhealthy attraction to the priest himself, the last thing he expects is compassion. Father Gray surprises him with his understanding and Jude accepts his offer of help in overcoming his condition.

When Sebastian Gray extends an offer of help to a troubled teenager, the last thing he expects is that it is Jude that will save him. Yet Jude steadily breaks through the priest's barriers, bringing him out of his self-imposed exile and into the world.

As the two find surprising parallels between their lives and obsession gives way to affection, both men begin to understand that their love may cost them their souls. Jude stands to lose his family to the truth of his affections, and Sebastian could fail in his original task; saving Jude, no matter what the cost.


End file.
